Windows 7 RC on Apple Mac Hardware
Posted on June 2nd, 2009
I still love all my MAC hardware but when doing a lot of heavy .NET development on my mac book pro I wish I didn’t always have to virtualize the environment.
Firstly, running Windows 7 RC in Vmware’s Fusion is great. It is fast, stable and generally a total turn around from Vista. I do however want the maximum out of my hardware so decided to try Windows without the virtual machine.
To do this I went away from the suggested Bootcamp installation since I had a bunch of spare, high speed SATA drives I threw on of those in and was off. The boot sequence on these machines is great, I just selected the Win 7 installer DVD and installed to the empty drive.
Once up and running I had to get some new drivers from Apple and install the Windows version of Bootcamp which helps with drivers, mouse support etc. Once I had all the drivers installed and rebooted I ran the test to figure out my machine’s rating. It scored a fantastic 5.7!! and before I had a 1.0 under fusion.
I still think Apple has the best hardware money can buy and would definately recommened buying their hardware and once Windows 7 is released, installing and using that. It is so fast, stable and great looking that it will blow you away.
Tags: mac, windows 7
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How to buy a Mac (and my setup!)
Posted on January 25th, 2009
Oh .. you think you already know? :) Read on….
It may seem quick and easy to just pick your next Apple Mac up directly from their website but many people don’t know you can get a much better deal by buying through a reseller such as Amazon. Not only are their prices better but currently Amazon are offering rebates which can save you a few hundred $$.
I thought I’d list out my hardware and directl purchase links for those who are interested. Let me start with the laptop, a must have at least for your first Mac purchase. There is a slightly cheaper version of this but I’d pay for the extra memory and speed – This link is the MacBook Pro 15″, 4 GB of Memory.
After that I decided that since I run a lot of virtual machines a laptop is never really going to be enough so I then went for a Mac Pro, the 8x Core XEON beauty and then added 10 GB of memory. Some of this was not purchased from Apple since their cost for memory and drives isn’t acceptable. I did still buy premium stuff and certified to work on those machines.
- Mac Pro, 8x Xeon
- 8 Gig Memory Kit (plus the 2 with the machine) give you 10 total
- 2x 500 GB SATA II, 3 GB, 72K11 storage drives
- 24″ Dell Monitor, a much better deal than a cinema display from Apple.
That workstation is definately the way to go. I can run 3-4 powerful virtual machines with several gigs of assigned memory with no performance lose what-so-ever! Not the cheapest setup in the world but definately a great working system.
Tags: hardware, mac
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For mail, I’ll wait until Snow Leopard is released.
Posted on January 11th, 2009
So as you can tell I really need a good email client. I do far too much work over email both work and private. When I posted earlier that I went back to the default Mail.app on OS X I forgot that I had seen a link for a beta of Thunderbird 3 from Mozilla.
After some searching I found the download link:
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/downloads.php
Turns out this does solve most of the issues I was complaining about. There still isn’t any background sending options but it is a beta, maybe they’ll be nice and turn that on just before release … you know … who doesn’t save a few gems for the end :)
Anyway, I had for other reasons started to look at the features that will be available in Snow Leopard the next big OS update from Apple. Turns out it will have, what they’re at least calling, full Exchange 2007 support for native applications like iCal and Mail. If this really is the case and it supports offline and remote email (RPC?/or OWA) then I’ll be rocking.
So I’m using a mix of Mail and Thunderbird 3 beta and it does the job. Fingers crossed for a release soon from Apple for the OS.
Tags: mac, snow leopard
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Back to Mail.app
Posted on January 10th, 2009
Well that didn’t last long did it! :) It only took two days to realize that Thunderbird is stuck in the 90′s. I can’t Q messages for back ground sending, you can’t drag an attachment into a new message (really!!?) and you can’t paste image data from the clip board into a message.
So for the time being I’m back to the native Apple mail client. Bummer.
Tags: mac
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OS X Email Clients … or lack of
Posted on January 8th, 2009
These posts are for my x-fellow windows users who might have or want to switch over the using a Mac. Not everything is 100% perfect and for some reason Email software is probably the biggest missing piece of Apple’s offering.
The default Mail.app that comes with os x is Ok but that is about it. If you’re like most people you need to connect to your work exchange server and the only way to do that is via IMAP. The IMAP integration in Mail just sux, no other way to put it. It jumps off messages while reading, gets out of sync with the server and other macs and sometimes gets really slow.
So I shopped around and besides Microsoft Office 2008 … you don’t really have any great choice. Sorry. I’ve heard MS Office 2008 is fine but I really only need Entourage (Outlook) and you can’t buy that on it’s own. Open office for the Mac is just dandy for almost everything else.
Right now the best IMAP client I can find is Thunderbird from Mozilla. It is fine but not great either, not enough editing options. As I stated in another post my personal email is kept on GMail so no worries with that.
So for now this is it – not great but still, better than living in a Vista world.
Tags: mac
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