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My New Old MacBook Pro 17-inch LCD Review

I am a proud owner of one of the first MacBook Pro 17-inch machines that made their debut two years ago — yes, I have a dreaded “A Revision” box — but that machine still sits next to me today and it has served me well through the writing of five books and it has never given me a moment of discontent… except for a bulging battery… but I never lost use of the machine in the battery swap with Apple.

Today, I am the prouder owner of what will likely be the last revision of the current MacBook Pro line before all the new Apple machines begin to look and feel like the MacBook Air. I couldn’t be happier with my new “old style” MacBook Pro.

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LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 301201U 2 TB USB 2.0/FireWire400/FireWire800 RAID System Review

Today it is time to meet the massive king of media storage: The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 301201U 2 TB USB 2.0/FireWire400/FireWire800 RAID System!  That’s a mouthful to say, a handful to type — and an eyeful of two terabytes of spinning storage glory for all your music and video files.

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iTunes Shall Be DRM Free

Yesterday’s rather boring Macworld Expo did have one good glimmer of freedom:  iTunes will no longer protect its music with the awful DRM that I hate.  Digital Rights Management was a golden goose egg that arrived too late and under-cooked.  I was pleased with the announcement that iTunes music would finally belong to those that bought it because that’s the way it was always supposed to be:  Only the container changed. When I jumped into the iTunes store to upgrade my 4,000 song strong iTunes-purchased library, I was met with this offer to upgrade:  $270.84USD for 1,304 total songs.  I clicked that “BUY” button and the download parade began.  Almost.

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Playing Microsoft Tag

You can see the new, tiled, background image for my Twitter account.  The multicolored bonanza of triangles and primary colors is mesmerizing and aesthetically pleasing, right?  Or is the image effect sort of eye numbing and hard on the retinas?  Did you notice the twitter logo shares the same color blue as my background image?  There’s nothing to that shared hue of blue except that “it is the color that it is” — which is a complicated way of saying, “it’s a popular primary blue.”

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Installing Windows 7 Ultimate on an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE

On Friday, I received the black version of the new kicking ASUS Eee PC 1000HE — the ultimate netbook, at a third of the price and twice the computing power, of the the awful Sony Vaio P — and the first thing I did after unboxing, and seeing the ancient Windows XP interface staring back at me, was to install my trusty beta of Windows 7 Ultimate.

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The Silky SSD Unibody MacBook Review

I now have a new 2.4GHz SDD unibody MacBook with 4GB of DDR3 RAM in my hot hands and this thing screams it’s so on fire!  Now I sort of understand why Apple doesn’t think it needs a Netbook like the awful Sony Vaio P or the right fine ASUS 1000HE.  The MacBook is the supreme computer, netbook and secret lover any passion could want, and I can’t imagine why anyone would touch a MacBook Air when they can have the new MacBook instead.

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MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen

After 20 years of using only DOS and Windows I am slowly making the switch over to the keen new Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro computers.
With an entry point of $1,000.00 USD for the MacBook there are going to be a lot of new sales to Windows Heathens like me who can’t resist a bite into an Apple running an Intel chip especially when our lives are becoming more and more image and video manipulation. 

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