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Glanced at the announcement for the revision to the Macbook lines.

The main change makes the entire notebook line very disposable. Sure notebooks tend to be that way. However the Macbook Pros are supposed to be aimed at a “Professional” market. As nebulous as that can be.

To my mind the logical lineup is a basic feature set that grows as you move up the line. Firewire and express card slot should be part of that basic set at least for 15″ and 17″.

Apple appear to have bowed to pressure and brought back firewire to the 13″. This makes it a very tempting small machine that I’d seriously consider. Even with the combined audio in / out jacks.

Interesting that they’ve brought back a 15″ at the old mid $2K price bracket. Look closely though. Its a high end 13″ with a 15″ screen. There is no discrete video card.

The big issue I have is the removal of the express card slot from the 15″. Apparently the SD memory card reader is considered more useful. That slot offered a good amount of flexibility for a notebook. As such its a deal breaker if I was in the market for a new 15″.

This leaves the 17″ as the “Professional” machine. But its a desktop replacement with quite a price tag and needs a chiropractor to help with the attendant back ache from hauling it around.

I can see why they’ve gone with a sealed battery. I’ve not got confirmation but I’d say the user replaceable memory and drive feature has probably gone as well. The benefits to Apple are two fold, customers are forced to order their upgrades up front (so improved options sales) and not needing to stock so many pesky batteries.

Where the designs appear to have gone as user friendly as possible. Its flipped the other way completely. No room for improvements. Totally sealed units.

I’m of two minds. Given my usage is fairly average these are not problematic. But for a media professional that’s quite a lot of limitations if they’re wanting to be totally portable. Once that battery is drained, good luck with finding a power point.

I don’t believe that Apple are saving on production costs by removing such features. Some just don’t make sense, like firewire. They’ve done it before and brought it back to the 15″. Its just odd. The designers seem to work in a bubble or at least have a very specific user requirement in mind.

By and large this works to their benefit. However this just seems to emphasise how disposable notebooks are becoming. Guess my next upgrade can wait for the next revision. Not that that’s a significant change.

Corrections:
The fun of leaping in boots and all. Apparently the Mac Book Pros can be upgraded by removing the bottom plate. Not as huge an issue as I initially thought.

According to Anandtech, the revised batteries grant significantly greater battery life. Staggeringly so based on their tests. So the tradeoff is the EC card slot being taken up by battery it seems. The 15″ almost doubles its battery life.

Thats not insubstantial. Well worth considering.

So I pulled the old desktop out. Refreshed it and have it running server duties. As I’m lazy as all get out, its running Windows XP. All thats needed is file shares and running TVersity for media streaming.

Flicking through the local stationary office supplier and big box store catalogs yielded a plethora of NAS devices. Some that even acted as DLNA servers. Nifty in terms of a plug and play option.

However there were a number of problems:

1. Wildly varying feature sets and price points.
2. Limited expansion.
3. Not quite as silent as expected.
4. Exchange rates causing prices to rise by 20% +.

Given these issues, I decided to plod on with the noisy heat generator.

But then the NForce 730i landed. In the shadow of the new Macbooks, these nifty HTPC motherboards offered a great feature set for a reasonable price. Reasonable graphics card, video acceleration, hdmi. All crammed into a small board designed to generate a minimum of heat.

So I set out wallet in pocket to upgrade just the core. Meaning CPU, motherboard and memory. The total cost was a touch more than the NAS option. However a lot more flexible and expandable.

Herein lies the problem. Most hardware stores are geared to volume. Even more so with the current retail climate. So these boards are scarce as hens teeth. Despite all the breathless press coverage.

So here sits CPU, memory, disk and SATA DVD burner with no useful purpose. Options multiplying to headache proportions. Going with the alternative Intel G series chipsets (supposedly less advanced but common as flies) or with a more standard motherboard (and possibly needing to upgrade the power supply as well).

The additional wrinkle. Mistakenly buying 1066 DDR2 memory.

When did it become so complicated ?

As with any and all things. Free doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Some free things are exceptionally good. Open source software is a great example. I won’t draw the distinction between speech and beer. Except to say that both are good.

I was tasked with fixing a computer. It was a Windows machine. So all the things that spring to mind were what was wrong.

If only people would choose more wisely. Examine what it is that they are being offered. Is it really worth installing ?

In this case it was the attempt to fix / remove the malware, spyware and virii infestation. Nearest I can figure they were using whatever first came to hand. Its not necessarily their fault.

As far as can be determined. The antivirus software was causing the menu bar to disappear, hijack the browser and cause reboots at random.

I disabled all non essentials with msconfig. Installed a spyware remover. Had it clean out malware and spyware.

The plan was then to run Housecall to look for virii. Unfortunately it locked up during the scan. The harddisk deciding that it was all too hard. It crashed unceremoniously with no warning.

Not even the usual plaintive grinding noises. Reboots yielded an error message that there were no drives.

The last resort is to try and recover the data by putting the drive in an external case. Crossed fingers that it responds.

Done the rounds. But still amusing.