New Toy/Tool

I’m writing this using Pendergast the second, the faster, thinner, brighter, more memoried successor to my “old” Powerbook. It also has one of those newfangled Core Duo processors that will allow it to thread the muddy FUDdy, virus and malware plagued waters of the world that Gates built. I will now be able to see how the other 94% lives without slowing down to a crawl with Virtual PC.

The speed my god, the speed!! This thing is fast, haven’t waited on anything yet, everything is snappy and according to the resource monitor so far I just touch 20% of CPU usage once in a while, compare that to the steady 55% from before, it already feels roomier. The screen is so insanely bright I’m happily keeping the brightness at 50% and it still feels clearer than before. The screen is also at a higher resolution so I’m keeping Firefox at the same size (previously fullscreen) and still have more than two inches left on the right and three quarters at the bottom.

The only trouble so far is the Flash player that wasn’t working, had to go back to version 8.0 of the plugin, and a few small accessories that I hadn’t kept upgraged, like Mail Appetizer and Coconutbattery that needed to be moved to the universal binary version.

Unrelated to the actual Macbook Pro but still a spot on the general experience of buying one; “ships in 1-3 days” is very misleading since built to order systems ship from China, adding 2 weeks to the process. I don’t give a shit is it ships in 2 days when shipping takes 2 weeks, a more realistic estimate would have been appreciated. I ended up buying (leasing really) a standard config. locally.