SigSays - All Things Reviewed

At the Dev Blog.

Lots of reviews on the way, stay tuned.

I have a new contributor, grue. He’s well versed in all thing Mac. His first review can be found here.

Well well, Apple comes through.

The last time I purchased (and kept…) a new laptop was as a university student in 2004, upon Apple’s release of the PowerBook G4 12″.  That machine intrigued me because it was the smallest laptop I’d ever seen with a non-compromised keyboard, and it still had a discrete graphics card, a DVD drive, and all the other associated bits I use frequently such as FireWire, wireless networking, and so forth.

Fast forward to 2008.  I’m still using my old and busted PowerBook which has been abused like someone being kept in an Austrian cellar, and hoping Apple will release a suitable replacement (I loathed the MacBook plastic models for a variety of reasons, including the screen, the housing, and the performance).  Suddenly, Apple releases the all-new MacBook Unibody, and I’m thinking “SCORE! They’ve recognized the need for a slightly-more-premium small-ish laptop!”
Wrong.  The screen still sucked, and for the love of god they removed FireWire? Seriously, Apple?

Anyway, two days ago Apple bestowed upon my life a gift: They readded FireWire, they upgraded the screen quality, and they renamed it MacBook Pro.  I bought one, and so with you I shall share it:

Typical Apple packaging:  Imagine the 15″ MacBook Pro box, and think of it a little smaller.  There ya have it.

Being an adventurous sort, I decided to forgo testing to see if it was dead out of the box in favour of immediately upgrading it to 4GB of RAM and swapping for a 320GB 7,200RPM drive.

Ten Phillips-head screws later, the innards are exposed:

The new (allegedly) 7-hour integrated battery comes with a warning. I don’t know what the reasoning behind this is, but I’m curious:

As per the norm, Apple has used Torx bolts as mounting pegs for the HDD. If you’ve never run into a T6 or T8 bolt, you’ve never worked on a portable Apple product.

Out come the old HDD (Hitachi 160GB and what I believe to be Micron RAM), and here they lay next to their replacements (Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and iRAM 2GB SO-DIMMs):

…and they’re in:

Now to reassemble and actually look at it:  Holy wow, that screen is shiny.

It’s worth noting at this point that I had two potential courses of action:  Clone the factory HDD to the machine over FireWire, or do a fresh install.  Being that I have no need for the 3 or so GB of printer drivers that OS X includes by default, or the god knows many GB of languages I don’t speak, I elected to do a fresh install.

So I powered up the machine and booted from the included installation CD.  I was caught off guard by how decent the screen is, even before calibration.  No, you’re not likely to be doing print work on it (it’s a laptop, after all, not a nice desktop IPS panel), but it sure does look nice compared to the junk that was found in the previous 13″ models (save for the Air, which this allegedly shares a panel with).

After installing the OS and such, I can comfortably say it’s a snappy machine.  I have a hell of a lot of installations to do, but my first hour and a half with the machine have been pleasant so far.

As I type this introductory review, I currently have my work software installing, and I’m looking forward to giving more of an in-depth review, but hopefully you’ve enjoyed having a look at the internals and my initial thoughts on the machine…

… Oh, and the buttonless trackpad is going to take a bit of getting used to.

Update 1: Front edge is kinda sharp. Yow.

Buy it on amazon

Just picked up a Netgear WNR834 B router to replace my aging Linksys WRT54G. I wanted to upgrade to Wireless N, but mainly I wanted to be able to run the full version of DD-WRT, a third party router firmware.

So far, so good. Installation of the firmware was easy, and everything worked. I have had it up and running for all of an hour, so I’ll report back with any issues. It appears to be a cheap way to get into wireless N and third party firmware.

Rating:

Since I was on an accessory spree, I picked up a CaseCrown case for my EeePC. I’ve been looking for something like this since I bought my EeePC last summer. Luckily the explosion of netbook popularity has lead to a flood of accessories. The factory sleeve is pretty good as far as protection, but I wanted something that could stay on the computer all the time, and also easily carry the basic accessories; the charger and a travel mouse at the bare minimum. I stumbled across this case on Amazon and had to have it. I’m very happy I did.

The case as a whole seems to be of high quality, nice stitching, nice sturdy zippers with heavy thick zipper pulls.

The outer pocket has plenty of room for the charger and a mouse, and I’m pretty sure a small external would fit as well, I’m going to check when I actually find my external, which seems to have disappeared.

And best of all, you don’t have to remove your computer to use it. The straps hold the case on nicely and all the plugs are accessible. I was honestly a little worried that the transparent straps that hold the top part of the case to the lid of the computer would be distracting, but I found that I didn’t even notice them.

This might be my favorite EeePC accessory so far, I love it.

Rating:

I have an EeePC netbook and I love the hell out of it, but no touchpad can come close to a real mouse. I finally broke down and picked up a Arc Mouse from Microsoft.

I’m absolutely in love with this thing. It’s amazingly small when folded up, and about the size of a normal mouse unfolded.  Windows 7 recognized it immediately. The buttons are nice, and it feels really good in my hand. The adapter is small, and stores inside the mouse when folded.

The scrollwheel is the only minor complaint I have, it’s not bad, but certainly could be better. It’s more than passable for a travel mouse though. Anyway, on to the pics. I used my iPhone as a size comparison, because I figure most people have seen one in person by now and have a pretty good idea as to it’s size.

Rating:

Initial impressions are very good. I’ll do a full review after a few days of use. Here are a few screens for now.

I finished Artie’s book the other day, and finally got a little time to write a review.

Overall, I liked it a lot. It wasn’t exactly perfect from a literary standpoint, in that it’s more a collection of stories than a cohesive story overall, but then again I doubt anyone is expecting it to be. All of Artie’s stories are very entertaining, some are even touching, and Anthony Bozza does a good job of capturing Artie’s “voice”. If you go into it knowing what to expect, a collection of Artie’s stories, you’ll likely be very pleased. I was.

Rating:

And I’m fucking amazingly impressed. I swear this is the last time I’ll talk about it until I do a full review. Buy it on Amazon.

Should be here thursday, I’ll post a review when I finish it. You can find it on amazon HERE.