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I just finish installing the Western Digital 320GB Drive in my MacBook Pro.  Get everything installed and OH SNAP!  I find a 500GB Hitachi 2.5″ Drive.

Well, needless to say, I am a space whore.  So, I ordered one from Other World Computing.   I did the Express overnight.  I ordered it yesterday morning, and today, it’s sitting on my desk.  It’s slightly larger than the regular 2.5″ drives.  It’s 12.5mm vs th 9.5mm height that most 2.5’s are.  However, I have done some research and it looks like it will go into a MacBook Pro 17″ with no issues.  I guess we’ll find out.

I am going to install it soon.  I’ll let you know how it all goes.

Here’s the link to what I got: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A53487/

I know it’s being posted all over the net right now. But I just wanted to put in my two copper’s worth on this.

I have purchased the MacUpdate Promo Bundle, I think it’s worth it.

Shameless Link: Today’s MacUpdate Promo, 40% off

It’s a great bundle with a lot of great software. Here’s what they are selling in the bundle:

Hazel
Art Text
MenuCalendarClock
Leap
StoryMill
Typinator
DVDRemaster Pro
Sound Studio
BannerZest
Parallels Desktop

It’s $64.99 for all the software. I’ll be honest, I was leary at first, but there were a couple pieces of software in the list I was interested in registering anyways and I said, what the heck and gave it a go.

It’s the real deal. I got my reg keys all mailed to me and life’s good.

Anyways, if you want to get it and you click on this link Today’s MacUpdate Promo, 40% off I’ll get $3 bucks… Come on, you know you like me enough and want to give a little support to my musings.

Thanks all!

I spent part of my afternoon today upgrading my Macbook Pro’s Hard Drive to 320 Gigabyte from the 200 that was in it originally. Boy, does Apple pack some stuff in the space.

Anyways, I took video of the whole deal. I’ll be working on it at some point this week and get it up on YouTube. It was fairly painless.

After the install, I just did a fresh install from the Leopard disks that came with the system. When it got to the point when it asks if I want to restore an account. I just inserted the old drive in my trusty Thermaltake BlacX and it found all my settings and went to town. It even transferred my VM’s with no issues.

Great stuff!

I have been a VMWare fan for a long time. However, on the windows platform I found that it was somewhat easier to use the Virtual PC software to meet my virtualization needs. Recently, I switched to the Mac OS X platform. One of the deciding factors for me to do this was that VMWare released Fusion for the Mac.

This is an amazing software, it allows me to run Windows and my Linux distributions within the Mac environment. It extremely stable and very responsive. As shown in a previous post..

MacVista - Mac on top, Vista on the bottom

Here is my “MacVista” screenshot.

I highly recommend VMWare Fusion.

For more information visit:  Switch to Fusion or Windows on Mac

Good Stuff!

We finished the install of OS X Leopard on the big black box that was intended to be our media server. We took a video of the install and posted it on YouTube.

We’re gonna do some more videos on how to do stuff like get unity working on vmware, install X11, and nvinstaller.

Well, I have had the MacBook Air now for 1 day. (well, almost 1 day) I like the form factor and the weight of it. It surprisingly fast for what it is. However, for what I do, here are some issues I have found. Read on…

First off, let me start by saying that I do not believe in dual booting. With all the various virtualization technologies out there, I believe one can achieve almost anything they want to do with a computer with one key OS. This is one of the reasons I went with the Mac platform. OS X, to me, is an extremely stable platform and from my point of view, I should be able to run my windows and linux apps all on one machine.

With that said, I don’t think the MacBook Air has enough juice/hard drive space to drive the applications that I want to run. With just a base install of VMWare Fusion and Vista Business 32-Bit and nothing else running. I am using 2o27 MB of ram with 21 MB free. With my base applications installed and the above Virtual machine, I am using almost half the hard drive space already.

For me and for my needs, I don’t think the MacBook Air will cut it. I kinda knew this going in. I was just hoping that I could make it work.

So, it’s back to the Apple Store later today and I am going to look at the 15″ MacBook Pro. From comparing the specifications, I think that’s the one I will be most happy with. (Damn, I was hoping for a good 13 inch Mac)

I don’t want to leave you with a bad impression of the Air. So, I will say the following about it: It’s a great laptop. I would say, for most users out there that want a good very portable laptop the MacBook Air is not a bad machine. As many others have pointed out, it’s a great supplementary laptop. (Which originally was what I was looking for) Supplementary meaning that you do not use the Air to replace your main computer, but use it for quick trips, traveling where you need quick portable access etc.

So, I leave you guys with a couple screenshots of my “MacVista Air”’s Desktop. I have GeekTools running with my console and top on my desktop. The second picture was to show Safari running side by side with Internet Explorer from the Vista virtual Machine in Unity mode.

Yes, I am a big fan of IronMan. Good Stuff!

PS We shot video of the unboxing of the MacBook Air and will upload it to www.youtube.com/technochubby when I get all this crap organized

Quick Edit: Right after I wrote this entry, I found the following article by Eric Benderoff: Apple’s MacBook Air Love Affair in which he sums it all up with “I don’t think I’m ready for the commitment the Air wants.” That there says it all

With the recent release of Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and my current frustrations with Vista,  I have decided to take a look at the Mac platform for my production work.

Yes yes, I know that I have been blogging about Linux and it’s variants, but for what I do, I need something that I don’t have to fuss around with much.  I need to be able to edit video and audio.  I need it to “just work”.   Linux is making great strides in multimedia, but from my perspective, there is still too much configuration required to make it work the way I want it to.

Moving forward, I have decided to try OSX out on a “hackintosh” BEFORE I spend real money on Apple hardware. (again, I know this is oxymoronic considering what I said in my last paragraph, but I don’t mind playing with the OS first then getting the hardware properly)  

With all that said, I decided to see if I can get Leopard running on one of my test machines.  Specifically, one of my Toshiba laptops with an AMD processor.  Since I do not trust downloaded software for the most part, I decided to buy a legitimate copy of Leopard to work with.  I figure, if all doesn’t work well for me, I can sell it.  (normally, I would just buy a Mac, but I can’t float the 2,000 for the time being - besides, 150 bux is better than 2k to try it out)  

For yet another piece of irony, from my research so far, I need to have a running copy of 10.4.x to get the AMD patches onto a Leopard install DVD.  (I had to download a copy of this - LOL)  It’s just temporary, but it’s funny to me none the less. 

I am in the process of doing the 10.4.x install now and was bored during the wait so I decided to do this post.  I will post the details of the install if all goes well.