The Butt Ugly Weblog

Some initial Macbook experiences

So, I got my badly overdue Macbook on Friday, and so far the overall experience has been positive. It's not as heavy as I feared (my old one is a 12" Powerbook), and the new display is simply gorgeous. Finally I can use it outdoors at full sunlight with no problems.

However, I had considerable trouble trying to migrate my data from my old computer. You see, I had managed to create a couple of files in iTunes which had random characters in their names, and it turns out that these files cannot be opened nor copied. The nasty bit being that Migration Assistant read dutifully for an hour, and then died at this random MP3 file - deleting everything it had moved so far from my home directory. So I had to run it again, and move the 40 -odd gigs of stuff yet again...

The fun thing about those files is that they can't be deleted either. You simply can't get rid of them. The only thing that works is that you copy (with cp -Rp) the directory which contains these files, then you need to remove the old directory (with rm -rf). You will end up with one directory which cannot be removed, because it's still not empty. You move that directory to /tmp/, and then rename the directory you copied to the original name.

In the end the only way I could do this was to do this whole process to my entire iTunes Music library. Which took a bit of a while. Then I ran the Migration Assistant again, and hey! It worked perfectly.

Other than that, the experience has been relatively smooth. VLC still does not run reliably, and World of Warcraft could be faster (but it's entirely playable, if you don't use the highest settings). Compilation on this beast is nice and fast - and it looks pretty cool too. The Macbook is clearly quieter than the old Powerbook, but my guess is that the Macbook's fans don't start turning so easily (i.e. it lets the computer run hotter). The Superdrive still sounds like it dies every time you insert/eject a CD, but then again, the only time it failed on me it was nice and quiet, so I'm welcoming the noise.

I've not yet found that it would run overly hot. Yes, if I really push it, then it does get hot, but I can actually hold it in my lap while I type this (I'm testing Parallels in the background, so there's some activity). Not that I would recommend it to anyone wishing to breed later on, though.

(Oh, and by the way, there should be a law against getting sick while on holidays.)