OS X Snow Leopard
9:09 Jun 9th, 2009 | 0 notes
Put simply, Snow Leopard is a fine tuned version of Leopard, the current version of the Mac operating system. Apple have clearly acknowledged this fact with one big statement: Leopard owners can get Snow Leopard for $29 flat. No paying $99 or $299 (like Windows), just that one flat number. $29!
Because Apple haven’t added anything imediately visable to the average user. What they’ve done is throw in a whole ton of brand new developer tools that will result in the fastest OS on the market. With the introduction of 64-bit technologies system wide, programs will run faster and more efficiently than they currently. Grand Central Dispatch and Open CL add to this by giving developers tools to take advantage of ever last drop of performance from a machine. Moving forward, this is a big step that will see the fastest applications ever.
With tweaks to Exposé, Finder, the dock, Stacks and tons of other basic OS X applications along with faster startups, shut downs and a brand new QuickTime player, I’m still quite surprised that it’s all only $29.
Besides, who doesn’t like seeing “2.8x faster”, “45% faster” and “50% faster” badges pasted all over a website right?
Should Our School Get Macs?
7:48 May 28th, 2009 | Notes
Here it is! My latest article for the school newspaper! Enjoy!
***
By now you all probably know that Macs are slowly making their way into more and more of the school. There are sleek, shiny iMacs creeping into computer labs in each of the campuses. This raises the question? Should the school get more Macs?
Personally, and from a completely bias perspective, I believe we should. Macs just work better than PCs in a school environment. Lets be honest, no body likes having to wait for all of the random pop ups to finish doing their thing and wait for firefox to open before they can start doing their work on the current PCs*. From my experience using the Macs in the music center, none of this stuff happens, allowing you to get down to work right away.
Macs also have features that save time when working. On a PC, if you have multiple web pages, documents and other files open, the task bar (the blue bar down the bottom) gets cluttered very quickly. This makes it hard for you to find the window you are looking for without dragging windows all over the screen to finally uncover the right one. On the Mac, there is a simple way to see all your windows at once and quickly select the one you were after. No hassles. All the Mac users will understand what I mean when I say “It’s the button on the keyboard that makes all the windows fly around”. Get what I mean? It’s features like this that make using a Mac very quick, painless and more efficient in getting you work done.
It’s also valuable to look at the trends in what computers students are buying. Last year the highest selling laptop in the high school and university student market was the MacBook. If computers are all about making life easier and simpler, the school’s buying habits reflect the students’ decision to move to a more user-friendly and painless computer. By that I mean the students recognize Macs are easier and are buying them, therefore the school should do the same for their own peace of mind. After all, peoples’ pockets don’t lie.
The computers at school are running a version of Windows that is getting close to eight years old. That’s decades in computer years. No matter what happens, in the next few years the school will have have to upgrade the computer as the life of Windows XP comes to an end.
What do you think? Should the school continue the trend of Mac purchases? Would you like to see Windows Vista in the library computer labs instead? Would you rather we wait for the release of Windows 7 before buying new computers?
***
*Note: Our school is using Novell which throws out tons of pop ups at login. Bleh!
Note: Article has been edited to maintain anonymity of my school! Yay civil liberties!
Note: Sorry for using so much italicized text.
OH NO! A Windows Explorer window and a Windows dialogue box both telling me that I have hundreds of viruses on my C: drive! Quick! I better download that .exe antivirus program to remove the viruses from my Windows XP PC!
Wait a minute…
Bonus Quiz!:
What’s wrong with this picture?
Dual Booting Windows 7!
11:18 May 23rd, 2009 | Notes
I’ve been meaning to dual boot the Windows 7 RC for a while now, but never got around to it for one reason or another. So this morning I decided I finally would.
Let me tell you, it takes a whole freaking day.
I went into this foolishly thinking that it would take a hour, two hours at max. Boy was I wrong. I began by clearing out my Mac of all the crap I’ve acumulated over the years to get me 50GB of space. I planned to devote just 20GB to 7, because I won’t need that much space. With the space cleared out, I ran Boot Camp Assistant a clicked partition.
“Partitioning Failed”
Crap. I eventaully learned that my drive was too fragmented to create 20GB of continuous space. Here’s where I jumped to conclusions: the Mac doesn’t have defragmentation software built in, therefore the Mac doesn’t get fragmented/it defragments on the fly.
WRONG!
What!? My drive is more fragmented than the chinese government!? NO! How do I fix it?!
Searching around the internet I found a few programs that claimed to defragment my hard drive… for $20. Since I don’t have a card that works on the internet, that idea went out the toilet. So I did the only logical thing, reinstall OS X. It took hours to get my Mac back to it’s original state. Wiping the drive, installing Leopard, partioning the hard drive, migrating my Time Machine backup, installing over a gigabyte of patches. THEN, I installed Windows 7.
The amount of driver problems I had was fairly minimal. The only big problem I had was getting the right driver for my graphics card. Windows Update got it right, then the Boot Camp Assistant installed another driver over the top of it and broke it! System Restore, Unintall Driver, Install Updated Driver.
OK done!
Finally, after about 10 hours I have Windows 7 installed on my Mac. Despite all the pain of going through all of this crap, some more good stuff came out of it. I have a partition I can install anything to, I have Windows 7 installed (duh) and it has speeded up my OS X install by quite a bit!
In the end, all I really have to show for it is that I have a pre-release version of Windows on my Mac.
I feel unclean…
