I've had the Macbook a week and a half now, and am getting into it big time. I use it at almost every available opportunity over the desktop PC. I still haven't explored half it's features, but what I have I'm very impressed with.
One BIG bonus after all my wranglings is that I appear to be able to save files to my NTFS formatted external hard drive. I've read in this month's Mac Format somewhere that someone posted one of their top pluses about Snow Leopard was it's support for NTFS. I'm not sure it was particularly high profile news, (perhaps someone can tell me otherwise), and I thought I'd read somewhere else that SL did have NTFS suport if you were prepared to go digging around in terminal.
Either way, I can save files to my Windows external HDD, and I'm very pleased about that. However, I ma making more use of the excellent Dropbox cloud storage solution so it doesn't really matter what machine I access my important files from.
I've also found, courtesy of Murray at Palm-Mac that "Preview" which I though was just a quick file viewer has a lot more to it than that including the ability for limited photo editing.
I'm going to get a photo editing programme for the MBP. I use Photoshop Elements (albeit an elderly v2) on the PC. I was toying with getting the GIMP which is free, but again, Mac Format suggests a program called Seashore, again free but not as fully featured as GIMP which may suit my needs.
Battery life which is mooted at about 7 hours looked a little optimistic in the first week but has settled this week and is definitely improving. It's good anyway, but I'm getting the battery monitor showing well over 7 hrs on occasions so long as I'm not hammering the device. I haven't used it for a couple of days, and charged it since about Sunday and it's sitting there telling me I have over 5 hrs remaining.
Although I've managed to connect my printer as a previous post indicated, I've since found out that my aged HP Deskjet 940C isn't supported with proper drivers. Shame. On the flip side I've been thinking about acquiring Canon's excellent Pixma MP640 all in one (A-listed by PC Pro) for a while, so may just bite the bullet. Irritatingly, a review I read on Amazon said the drivers for this in Mac OSX SL are coming....although it it possible to get the thing to work. Better check first though!
Other things I thought would irritate me don't. The transposition of the ' " ' and '@' symbols on the keyboard compared to a Windows Keyboard is fine. Using the Apple "Command" key rather than the CTRL key is also straightforward. I can't say I've really missed the simple Windows "delete" key.
So all in all, it's looking good. Almost 2 weeks in and I'm not regretting this purchase one bit (other than when my credit card bill arrived today....)
No comments:
Post a Comment