Blog name change to intelmaccoreduo.blogspot.com

I have just changed the name of the blog from sgnewbiemacminicoreduo.blogspot.com to intelmaccoreduo.blogspot.com. This was not because it was just shorter and easier to remember, but because I just got a MacBook Pro for work! So now, I have two intel mac core duos... not just a Mac Mini at home. Hence the name change.

Ok... before going any further.. here are the specs of my new MacBook Pro:

MacBook Pro (Intel Core Dual)
Powered by a dual-core Intel engine. Up to four times the speed of a PowerBook G4. Eight times the graphics bandwidth and with built-in iSight.


15-inch : 2.0GHz
SGD$ 4,588.00

15.4-inch TFT Display
1440 x 900 resolution
2.0GHz Intel Core Duo processor
with 2MB shared L2 cache
667MHz frontside bus
1GB (single SO-DIMM)
667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300)
100GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
with 256MB GDDR3 memory
Full-size, backlit keyboard
Built-in AirPort Extreme
Built-in Bluetooth
Built-in iSight
Apple remote control
Expresscard/34 slot
Dual-link DVI video out
Gigabit Ethernet
USB 2.0 and FireWire 400
Optical/digital/analog audio in/out

Google Calendar & Mac

Just something I forgot to mention in my last post.

When Google Calendar launched last week, I immediately went to the site to sign up. I was using my office computer (Windows) and filled in my calendar for the following week. It was very cool to share it with my colleagues and assign permissions etc. I also shared it with my wife.

So I get home and tried to show it to my wife on our Mac Mini. Nope. Not going to happen.

Why? Google Calendar says that Safari is not supported by the application. I don't know why. However, Firefox V1.5.0.2 is supported for the Mac. I had not bothered to download Firefox yet so here was my excuse. Anyhow it seems to work fine on Firefox on the Mac Mini Intel...

Boot Camp - Day 5-10

Well, I went to Apple Centre on Day 5 and got my Mac Mini back. They could not replicate the problem and could not figure it out. They had the machine on overnight and it was fine. It never got hot and it never turned off....

So for the last 5 days I have been putting it through its paces and have not found the problem again. I installed LimeWire and proceeded to download many episodes of SmallVille Season 5. I left the computer on overnight on a few occasions. On the WinXP side I installed a few minor programs here and there. What I have noticed is that the boot time has degraded again to about 1 minute.

I have bought a 7-port USB hub from Sim Lim Square - there is a small shop on the topp (6th) floor that seems to be an "outlet" store for Mac and Ipod accessories. It is new and does not have proper signage, but is a proper store. They have boxes of iTrip, and other Ipod acessories. Cheap Mac keyboards (S$20) and software. I bought Toast 5 with Jam 5 for S$50. The USB hub works fine, but does not like my external HardDrive - which then has to be plugged directly to the USB port of the Mac Mini. Maybe it is a power issue.

The HardDrive above is my former PC drive which I scrapped from the carcass. It is formatted for WinXP Home on NTFS so I can access the info on there but not change or save to it. On WINXP boot of the Mac Mini, I can of course have write access. However, in both cases, I can not access my old "user" directory as I am supposed to boot into that directly, so some of my info can not be accessed at this time.

Anyhow, so far so good. I guess I have graduated from Boot Camp now and am moving on into Basic Training.

I am on the road for the next week or so, so I may not be posting here... In fact, I am on a plane right now from Singapore to London and am posting this via the plane's wifi connection provided by Boeing - www.connexionbyboeing.com !!!

Boot Camp - Day 4

I went to the AppleCentre @ Funan today to discuss about my Mac Mini and the heat that it was giving off last night.

Louis - the techie that helped me yesterday - was on leave, so I was helped by Steven. I told Steven what I thought, and they managed to reach Louis. Louis - who opened up my computer yesterday - says that he did not change anything. It is not possible to change transformer or whatever; he only reseated the RAM.

In any case, the computer ran fine in the shop. No problems whatsoever on OSX or WINXP. It even booted up quick too! I compared the heat dissipated to another unit they had there and it was slightly warmer, but not as hot as the night before. Now what?!?!?!?

Steven says he will keep until the next day and do some tests on it and see if anything comes up. I reluctantly agreed.

Here endth Day 4...

Boot Camp - Day 3

My wife woke me up with morning to tell me that there is a error message on the computer something to the effect that "There was an error in system, data has been deleted and could not be saved". YIKES!!!!!! (remember I left it on the night before on WinXP download torrent files.)

I ran downstairs to the machine to see the Windows Shut Down screen with a bunch of Error Messages on it. I clicked various pop up boxes with messages like "Error on drive F:$. Data can not be saved." So I am supposed to click "OK" or "Cancel". Of course, "Cancel" gets me nowhere. I start clicking "OK"s. After the 20th "OK", I see the "Windows is Shutting Down" message.

Anyhow, I booted back up to Mac OSX and the system seemed fine. I don't think I lost anything. But it still took over 2 minutes to boot to the Mac OSX, so I decided to try to take care of the long boot/start-up time today.

I took the Mac Mini to where I bought it at AppleCentre @ Funan Centre. I brought the Mac Mini itself, but not the power "brick" as I figured they would have one there. The technician - Louis - said that they did not have the right power brick at the workstation. He took the Mac Mini into the back of the shop. I can see that he opened it up. I walked away for awhile looking at the other toys in the shop. He called me over to a display station and proceeded to swap my Mac Mini into the place where another one was sitting. Then as the computer was booting up, he pressed some combination of keys with both hands. He says he was "reseting" it to clear the cache. He says that this only needs to be done once in a while and is usually not needed.

Whatever it was, it worked. The Mac Mini took less than 30 seconds to boot up; I did this a couple of times. I was quite happy as I packed up my Mac Mini and walked off.

I just came home and plugged the Mac Mini back in and turned it on. It took a minute to finish start-up - longer than at the shop but shorter than before. After checking email and some surfing, I decided to reboot to Windows. This is when things took a bad turn.

It refused to boot up. It kept on powering off. I gave up trying to get into Windows and just let it boot up normally into Mac OSX. It STILL powered off after about a minute. I am getting really worried. I put my hand on the Mac Mini and felt that it was pretty warm. Warmer than I have ever felt it (the Mac Mini had always been cool to the touch no matter how long it stayed on.) Now I am REALLY, REALLY worried.

Thinking back, perhaps Louis changed out the transformer or some power conversion in my Mac Mini when he took it in the back of the shop. If he did so then, it would be mean that it currently has the wrong transformer and is not compatible with my power brick at home. I am only speculating but my Mac Mini is now kaputt. Back to the AppleCentre tomorrow... GRRRRRRR....

Boot Camp - Day 2

I did not have too much time on the system today. It still takes minutes to boot up and I still have to hold down the "option" key until they choice of Windows/Mac comes up, since I choose Mac as default.

I installed an old copy of Microsoft Money 2001 on it because I have not been updating my finances since my Windows CPU broke down 2 months ago! It seems to install fine, but I can't find my old Money file... Sigh.....

Next I installed BitTorrent. Then I remembered that I did not like the BitTorrent interface and then had to install BitLord. I wanted to download a couple of episode of Smallville Season 5 which seems to be very hard to find or at least ones that are properly seeded. (These are Episodes 2, 6, and 9). So BitLord installed fine and I went to search for my Smallville Torrents and started downloading.

Then, while on Windows, I popped in a DVD with a bunch of Smallville Xvid formatted episodes and Windows shared the Mac Superdrive onto my Windows network. Why? So that I can watch the episodes from my Plasma TV through my modded Xbox (which is connected to my network of course). That worked fine. Another tick in the box.

I left the machine running to download over night....

Running Windows on Mac, SIMULTANEOUSLY ???!!!

I saw this on Wired today. Have a read here.

It talks about Parallel's and VMWare's "virtualization" efforts as well as the Wine project.

Unfortunately for me and my Mac Mini - "not all of the new Intel-Macs will handle virtualization equally. Parallels Workstation is expected to run better on the MacBook Pro and iMac than it will on the Mac mini, Rudolph said. That's because the two higher-end machines include chip-level hardware support, known as Intel virtualization technology, or VT, that improves performance to near-native levels".

I did not know that what I bought - umm - did not have VT. I did not know that there was such a thing as VT. But now I am disappointed I don't have it....

While we are on Wired, here's another story - "Intel Macs: Doublethink Different".

And another one by Robert Cringely on Apple selling OSX to PC users.

Boot Camp - Day 1

OK so the other day I downloaded Boot Camp. I wanted to make sure I read all the documentation before going ahead. Good thing that I did!

So I ran Boot Camp on MacOSX and printed the instructions out as Boot Camp told me to do repeatedly (So did Walt Mossberg in his article). Actually, I sent the document to my PC so that I did not have to print it out. And yes you should have it in front of you when you are attempting this.

Firstly it told me I did not have the latest firmware... so I went to the Apple website and found it here. (this is not OSX 10.4.6 which is the OS which I already had)

I burned the Drivers disk which everyone should! This essentially has all the drivers for the Intel Mac hardware for Windows XP. Once you have Windows running, the first thing you should do is pop in this disk. I am getting ahead of myself.

So Boot Camp ran fine and partititioned my Intel Mac drive with a Windows Partition (10GB) and then I couldn't find my Windows XP SP2 disk! Damn.

After looking around, I manage to find the disk! So I am all set. I continue with Boot Camp which then restarts my computer. For some reason which I am still trying to figure out, I have a very long boot up time (this is before Boot Camp) so I waited for a while before I saw the Blue installation screen ... Yikes!!! ( I will write about the boot up experience in another post).

I went through the instructions that was given as I followed Window's own installation - do stick to Apple's instructions! Name your partition C: drive. I also choose FAT over NTFS as apparently FAT is more compatible with MAC OSX:
===
NTFS— Provide better reliability and security.
If you format the partition using the NTFS file system, you will not be able to write or save files to the Windows volume from Mac OS X.

FAT—Provides better compatibility.
Allows you to read and write files on the Windows volume from Mac OS X. This option is a available only if the Windows partition you created in Step 2 is 32 GB or smaller.
===

So I go through the normal Windows installation and everything is fine until it asks for my Windows installion key (you know the 25 alphanumeric set of codes that you need to put in?). Where the heck did I put that? Stuck on my old PC somewhere? Fiddle -- fiddle -- search -- search. FOUND! an hour later!!

Ok.. so I stick that in and 15 minutes later... it was done. I had Windows XP running on my Mac INTEL!!!!!!!!! I feel cool.

But then, it is a blank XP install... there is nothing on it except the basics IE, Accessories, etc. I have to dig up all my Windows programs and install them all again. Sigh...

Anyhow, I finished up by downloading Google Toolbar, MSN Messenger, MS Intellitype and Intellipoint for my wireless keyboard (see other post) - Windows version this time. I now realize that I need to install everything on both OSes. Sigh...

Ok.. just to check I rebooted to see if I messed up my OSX. It booted into Windows by default.. Yikes!!! OK.. Reboot again and hold down the Option key (or ALT key in my case). so I had to hold it down for about 4 minutes because I was still having my long boot up time problem..... But everything seemed fine. Mac OSX was working normally....

All in all.. It was not that bad. I guess I could have been more organized. But there is still more work to do now to install my Windows stuff back up. (or at least the programs that I want but could not get on Mac). More on this stuff another time.

More detailed info and instructions on Boot Camp here at WinSuperSite!

I going to Boot Camp!!

Ok... everyone has heard the latest news about Boot Camp. And Apple's price went up by 10% (though I guess the "irrational exuberance" has gone now and the price has started to come back down again.) But then again, if you get Walt Mossberg writing about it in WSJ, then the price may stay there a bit longer.

I have read the following reactions:

1) Great. now I can use my software without dealling with Virtual PC.

2) Cool now I will go out and buy an (Intel) Mac.

3) Many existing Mac users say "What difference does this make?"

For me, this will potentially solve a number of outstanding issues.

Anyhow, I am downloading Boot Camp now.... Then we shall see...

Non-Apple Keyboard with Mac Mini Duo Core

One of the peripherals that I had from my PC which I salvaged for this Mac Mini Duo Core is my wireless keyboard and mouse. While I do like the look of the Apple Keyboard and Mice, I have seen what happens to my colleague's keyboard after a while - the dirt and grit shows up better on a clear keyboard! Anyhow, no reason to waste money on a new keyboard when I've got one that works fine.

Well, almost fine... I am used to keyboard shortcuts on Windows like CTRL-C for Copy and CTRL-V for Paste. On Mac, I have to use the Option key, and there is also the Command key. Easy enough except that my PC keyboard does not have these keys. I looked for some way to map the CTRL to Command and ALT to Option, but did not have luck at first.

Then I realized that my keyboard is made my Microsoft - which does have decent (arguable I guess) support for Mac. So I search Microsoft's Mac site and found the Mac Driver! See here.

FYI....

My keyboard is Microsoft Wireless Multimedia Keyboard 1.0A.
My mouse is Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0


Every thing seems to work well after I installed the IntelliType Pro/IntelliPoint. This puts two icons into my System Preferences under Other: "Microsoft Keyboard" and "Microsoft Mouse". These have a number of options available for customizing the keyboard and mouse. I actually think the interface is easier than the PC version of these software.