Mac Update

I thought that I would write an update on how the Mac experience thus far.

I have been using the MacBook Pro (MBP) every day at school. Here is the list of my observations so far:

• The space bar squeaks. No kidding. I generally type the space bar with my right thumb, and when I do, I get a squeak. Perhaps it needs some lube. I may take it down to the Mac store and see if I can get that taken care of. I mean, it has only been a week.
• As for performance, I have been quite happy with the speed. One of the key things that I was looking for here was the performance of the Parallels Virtual Machine. I have loaded up my Windows XP, giving it half of the 2GB memory. Most of the work that I do with windows does not need extreme graphics, and I found that going with 16MB graphics in parallels (the max is 64) I get better performance. Generally in XP, I have MS Outlook running in the background monitoring my school e-mail, and then running whatever application I need for school. Working with VS2005 and the NORMA tool, I have not noticed significant slow downs when building the application over my Thinkpad. I think that having the 2.4GHZ DUO processor makes up a bit. The Thinkpad was 2.16GHZ.
• I tried the Boot camp, which worked great. I was even able to VM boot from the Boot camp partition. This is great, however, I immediately noticed the loss of the suspend ability in Parallels. Well, that feature is important to me. I installed VISTA on the Bootcamp partition, loaded all the drivers and the speed seemed really good. However, the purpose of getting the MAC was to learn the OSx and UNIX environments, so I removed my Vista install, removed the Boot camp changes to the HD, and I will be sticking to the Parallels VM of XP that I have for now. When I am done with school, I might do a Vista in Parallels, although I have heard that performance is not good with Vista and Parallels.
• I had read some reviews regarding the heat issue and the MBP. The left side of the machine stays warm. I would say that it has only gotten HOT in a couple of instances where the machine was under a workload for an extended period of time. When I am at school, plugged in, I am working in FULL POWER settings. I notice that when I lower everything to conserve power, that it cools a lot.
• Software: I have found a world of software that was inaccessible to me before. Lots of shareware and freeware too. All of the apps that I have checked out have been from recommended lists and have been good. Perhaps I will make a list and blog it sometime in the future.
• I have found the OS x user interface to be quite easy to use. I like the expose features that make switching between programs pretty easy.

Overall, I am happy. I feel like I have a quality machine, which is in a nice package. Quite literally, the only disappointment is the keyboard squeak. Hopefully that can be fixed under the warranty.