Clubbing in the house

June 12th, 2010 | By 49

Apps I’ve added to my Apple MBP 15:

iStat – gives info like memory/hdd space/temps/fan speeds on the Dashboard.

gfxCardStatus – allows you to see if you’re using the intel video chipset or  nVidia.

Monolingual – frees up hd space by deleting languages like Finnish. I am keeping Klingon. nearly 2 gigs was freed!

VLC – for video playback (thanks Eric H)

Nambu – Twitter client

Problem:

The MBP stopped talking properly to the wifi at home. A download from Ableton kept going but web browsing was mostly nil. SAFari said there was no internet connection. Chrome/Gmail said there was a limited connection. Tried turning Airport off/on and re-adding my WAP. No dice. Gf’s Dell was on it fine. Giving the MBP the doubt I power cycled the router for 15 minutes. No dice. Restarted the MBP and all is well again. Apparently there is an issue with my Actiontec MI-424 ‘erizon ‘IOS router and Apple Airport wifi card.

While “Erasing” an external hard drive, Time Machine seemed to lock up so I had to learn about using Force Quit. Then Finder crashed. Then I told it to restart and it hung with just my background image on the display. I let that sit and then read about doing a Control-Command-Power button to restart  it. That did the trick! Fourth day of ownership and I’m becoming a real power user eh? The external hard drive is an ugly brown but since its the dedicated Time Machine drive, I called it Doc Brown.

Ownership Notes:

Geez this thing is quiet. It’s a bit creepy. You hear the 5400rpm hd ticking when its being accessed, otherwise you have to lean toward the laptop to hear its fans. Apparently there are two of them… spinning at ~2000rpm.

In the store, I didn’t like the silver border of the anti-glare/matte display. It looks nicer in the softer lights of home?

The i5 cpu is a beast. The only time I was able to make this thing bog down was when I had Server 2003 and Windows 7 VMs going at the same time.  I want to render video on this thing!