As they say in the commercial, I’m a Mac. Have been for a very long time. Lately that’s meant a laptop and the 17-inch MacBook Pro has long been my weapon of choice.
Until this week.
The casino where I work runs a lot of old technology. One of my first steps was to help the marketing department upgrade to a quartet of MacBook Pros with Cinema Displays. Later I added an 11-inch MacBook Air to the floating IT laptop pool. A sliver of PCs have been upgraded to Windows 7, with the majority still on XP. Don’t even ask about the servers…
I was tired of 1) having a PC tower plus my personal laptop and 2) not having a work laptop. When a friend of mine was selling his lightly used 13-inch MacBook Air, I had accounting cut him a check and started planning my new setup.
When the 13-inch arrived, I loved the size compared to the smaller Air. The screen resolution of 1440×900 was a big drop from the HD 17-inch, but still good enough to place Chrome on one side and Twitter/iChat on the other. Combined with careful configuration of hot corners, Mission Control and Dashboard, the smaller screen size is really a non-issue.
The limited number of ports has caused a bit of cord shuffling (and a run to the Apple Store for a USB-Ethernet adapter). My friend sent along an external SuperDrive, which has come in handy a few times so far. I had an extra USB hard drive that I’m using for an encrypted Time Machine backup, but that needs to be unplugged when I want to charge my iPhone. The Thunderbolt Display looks mighty tempting with all those extra ports…
The build quality on these machines is just amazing – so solid. I love the size and feel of the lighted keyboard keys and the screen is bright and crisp. Wireless connectivity has been flawless and battery life seems OK (although I usually have it plugged in). This model has the upgraded i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB solid state drive. Performance has been wonderful so far, handling most everything I throw at it (which usually means 8-10 simultaneous running apps). The clean install of the OS seems to have eliminated most of the negative Lion experiences I had on the old laptop.
Going from a 1TB normal hard drive to a 250GB SSD created a few challenges. I realized a lot of that space was consumed by music and photos. I kept all of my personal photos on the old machine (although many of the “best” images are already online here) and just loaded work photos into Aperture. Google Music came along just in time to solve the music issue – I uploaded 17,000+ songs to their servers for free and just listen to them in Chrome. Overall, I’ve used up about half of the space on the SSD so far.
My primary goal was to run everything on this machine, eliminating the need for the PC tower in my office. I really only used that computer for payroll, our golf reservation system and Outlook. There are a slew of other Windows-only apps we use in the company, but I never really ran them much. I wanted the new laptop to have all of these programs too, so I could finally learn and use them effectively. Enter VMware Fusion 4.1.
I’ve used virtual machines for years, but always reluctantly due to performance issues. The specs of this machine, combined with the just released 4.1 version of Fusion, make it tolerable (if not damn-near equal to the PC). I started with a clean Windows XP environment, loading all of the virus/spyware/adware/firewall crapola and system updates. Once that was ready, my staff installed Office 2010 (including Access), multiple casino, resort and marketing apps, along with the aforementioned payroll, golf reservation and Outlook stuff.
I can basically run a full-screen Windows XP environment in one of the spaces, bound to our domain, that acts just like the PC tower. Just for kicks, I added Windows 8 and Ubuntu VMs for testing and training. Everything installed smoothly and the Fusion preferences for shared networking, file sharing and printing just work.
Back on the Mac side, I purchased (or transferred) licenses for Photoshop CS5, Pixelmator, Coda, Transmit, BBEdit, Aperture, OmniGraffle Pro and Pages. Free or included apps include Chrome, Firefox, Twitter, iChat, Dropbox, CoRD, Terminal, Screen Sharing, NetNewsWire, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Google Music Manager, VLC and Perian. Configured the VPN and localhost web environment and now I’m good to go.
Well, almost. Still need to troubleshoot an Oracle connection issue, finish setting up HP’s ProCurve Manager, optimize some firewall/VPN/wireless settings and download my old MySQL tool. Oh yeah, Coda needs to be configured and hooked into our hosted SVN solution too.
Not bad for a 2.96-pound sliver of technology, eh?
