New Computer

Post date: Oct 25, 2008 11:30:43 PM

So I ordered a new computer last week, specifically a laptop, which I've done without for quite a number of years (since my last gigantic crappy dell), I'll let you guess as to which one I got

And so far, I'm pretty happy with it, I'm looking forward to fiddling around with OSX. I ordered it simultaneously with a hard drive order from newegg, so I would have the requisite disk space to triple boot it with OSX, Ubuntu, and Vista. And no I won't go into the details of how I got that to work, suffice it to say that its a tedious process, there's a lot of different techniques floating around out there, and most of the information you'll find is outdated or slightly wrong. So, in summary, Boot Camp sucks, and rEFIt rocks.

The trackpad on it rocks, its almost as good as using a mouse, my only wish is that it wasn't on a hinge so you could push down anywhere and initiate a click as easily as if you're fingers where at the bottom of the trackpad. I love the multitouch features though, I only wish I could get them to work in Vista and Linux, hopefully someone will figure that out and post instructions/software on how to enable it.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to share files between all operating systems. There are some free solutions, and some pay solutions. On the OSX side of things there is MacFUSE and ntfs-3g, I downloaded a version with "performance patches applied" here, which seems to work, if reports of it being too slow pan out, then Paragon has a non-free solution I guess I could try. On the Vista side, there's MacDrive (non-free) and a bunch of other options, none of which look nearly as nice, I'm afraid I might have to buy this when my trial expires. On the Linux side I'm still exploring my options, cautiously, because of the last time when I corrupted a filesystem trying this stuff. Originally, I was planning on keeping all my work on a fourth partition, probably fat32, so that everything could read it, which may or may not be possible due the requirements of the different OSes and bootloaders, I still need more information before/if I try this.

UPDATE: I had wanted to mention something about replacing the hard drive, which was reportedly easy to do with the new MacBooks. First, it is easy... but if you're not paying attention you're new drive will rattle around in the casing, and you might not realize it for awhile (like me). Looking at the original hard drive the reason soon becomes obvious, there are 4 little metal nubs that keep the drive in place. Fortunately, you can unscrew these and attach them to the replacement drive, but you will need a very specific (and very small) screwdriver head for this, its one of those little six pointed things, the precision screwdriver set I picked up at Home Depot labeled it as T7.