After some hiccups at the Santa Monica Apple store (idiot clerk and manager), I have a unibody MacBook Pro 17″ with the Anti-Glare (matte) option in hand and take it home.  It sits on the shelf for a couple of days while I get the stuff that I normally add to my MacBooks when I buy them.  Palmguard, keyboard protector, etc. (this took an act of congress because everyone was out of stock and I had to order it all)

Finally, I start to prepare it for my daily use.  This time, I decide that I am not going to do a migration of my old mac to my new mac using the Apple migration tools (Time Machine restore or the Migration Utility).  I decided to install everything from scratch and start with a “clean slate”.  I spend a good day or so installing everything one by one.  I even bought a new G-Drive Q 1TB for my backup volume.  It all goes pretty smooth.

Once all of the stuff I use to get my work done is all installed, I start using the new machine like I did my old one.  I started to notice that it was kind of sluggish and various intermittent problems started to happen.  (the main problem I noticed was that it would “hang” at various times with the spinning beach ball of death for a few seconds to a couple of minutes and then start humming along again like nothing happened)  I started to regret my purchase.

I did all the usual stuff, verified disk, permissions, etc etc.  Again, you must remember, I installed everything from scratch.  No remnants from the previous machine.  The one thing I should note, is that the Time Machine backups on the new G-Drive seemed to be going fine.

After all of that, it still seemed kind of buggy/sluggish/just not right.  I know, I had read some of the issues that others were having.  So, I figured I’d give it a couple days and see what I can do, if not would call support or take it back to the Apple Store and see what they could tell me.  I was still able to use it, albeit somewhat frustratingly.

The next morning, I get up and it’s still running, but I can’t get the screen to come back on.  I hard reset it and nothing. (OH, I got the signature Apple startup BONG!  Then nothing)  The system seemed like it was going through the boot process but nothing on the screen.

I then proceed to go through all the troubleshooting steps.  Forcing boot from CD, attempt to get it to go into Hardware Diagnostic mode, firewire boot, etc etc  all to no avail.  I decide to pack it up and return it.

This took an act of congress!  The clerks at the Beverly Center Apple store were very inflexible.  I won’t go into all the details, but I received a lot of attitude from the clerks and “lead on the floor”.  Finally, a manager “Jenny” was able to help me and provide me with a replacement and an explanation of what my options were and why some were not possible.  To be fair, I have gotten used to a certain level of service from the Las Vegas Town Square Apple Store because of the amount of business I have done there in the past.

I take this SECOND MacBook Pro home and fire it up.  At the appropriate portion of the initial login, I plug in the G-Drive and restore my settings from the Time Machine backup.  (I tested this backup  on another Mac here and verified it with no issues)  The restore to this new machine all goes smooth.

Now this machine so far seems to be running great.  It’s definitely not sluggish at all.  I’ve not seen the previous freezing.  I installed a couple games on it, World of Warcraft (of course) and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3.  These are blazing fast on this machine.

Then I go to my Screen Saver settings…  FREEZE, CRASH, BANG…  BEACH BALL!  The first App I have to force quit is my System Preferences.  LOL

I don’t panic.  I notice that everything else is running smoothly BUT this ONE thing.  I figure it’s an isolated issue.  I spend hours googling and doing research.  My diligence pays off!  I fix the issue…  (this is covered in depth on the TechnoChubby site – Click here to read it)  Compared to the issues with the last Mac, this was nothing.

I just fixed that issue a few hours ago.  I’ve had this SECOND unibody MacBook Pro 17″ for a couple of days now.   Everything is going smooth it seems (knock on wood).  All in all, it’s a slick ass machine.

I am liking my new setup.  Andrew’s happy he got my old (LOL) 17″ MacBook Pro (late 2008).  Mike got his 15″ and I think he’s happy with that.  I am using Mike’s old white MacBook (early 2009) to test out the idea of getting an Air or a unibody 13″ MacBook Pro for my take everywhere machine.

I need to note, that this posting could have easily been three or four times longer.  There were several other hiccups that occurred.  They were very minor compared to what I shared here.

Just to touch on a couple of things:

• Santa Monica Apple Store – Won’t go back unless I absolutely HAVE to.
• Beverly Center Apple Store – Thanks Jenny for your patience and understanding.
• Century City Apple Store – Thanks for your help
• iTunes Support – Thanks Jesse for getting my authorizations squared away
• Power Support Retail outlet Burbank – Thanks Steven for your help with my accessories
• Thanks swmbuk for the FIX!

Alright, that’s it.  Thanks for letting me share (and vent).

Well, World of Warcraft (WoW) has surprised me.  I was expecting your average run of the mill linear leveling MMO.  (And NO Diablo II is not a Massively Multiplayer Online game – MMO – Someone said today that it was)  For all intents and purposes, on the surface, WoW is like any other leveling MMO out there.  You go from level 1 to X and work your way and work on gear along the way.  The “End-Game” is comprised of raiding etc.  However, an aspect that I have not seen other games get close to right. Is the Player vs Player aspect.  This is very integrated in to the WoW gaming experience.  I am not normally a PvP type of player, but I like how it’s implemented in WoW and have surprised myself on how much I am enjoying it.

Now, with that said, PvP generally brings out the kiddies and the immaturities.  This is also true of WoW.  Originally, a group of my friends and I started on a regular PvP realm (server) and were just wore down by the level of immaturity on the server that we were going to give up and go to a regular non-pvp server.  Deciding to give it another go, we checked out a Role Playing PvP realm (RP-PVP).  Generally, Role Playing servers have a more mature level of players on it.  So, we wanted to see if this was true with WoW.  So far it is.

We found the Emerald Dream server and joined up with a fledgling guild that has great people (so far) .  We joined up with Endless Rain ( http://endless.wowstead.com/ ).  We’ve met some great and not so great people and overall the experience has been MUCH better. If you’re looking for a good start in WoW or a change, check us out.

- Zenshinzo, Level 60 Night Elf Druid – Emerald Dream server

As far as life goes.  Well, we have to upgrade the server software again.   The never ending updating continues.  CentOS is now 5.2 and I have been testing the stability on a couple of our boxes.  So far so good.

We’re still working on migrating all of our machines to the Mac platform.  We’re gonna go with a 15″ MacBook Pro for Angel and a 17″ for Andrew.  Draylan’s probably going to get a 13.3″ one when we are able.  I was originally going to get stand alone Mac Pro for our “server” box, but these new Intel Extreme iMac’s are looking promising.

We’re working on moving to Los Angeles here in the next couple of months.

AND  TechnoChubby.com is still coming soon   Getting closer, I have fleshed out the categories and have a test site running.

That’s about it.  Tune in next time….

In it’s stead, I decided to throw together a quick video of why I switched from World of Warcraft to VMWare Fusion. (I know, I know.. it’s not the same type of app. I just thought it would be fun) Enjoy:

Anyways, I do want to say that I have been a virtualization user for quite some time. From the very early days of VMWare (geez, what years ago). I have tried Parallels, Virtual PC, and a host of others. I have not found anything to work quite as well as VMWare does. I use all of their products, Fusion, GSX/ESX, Server, and Workstation.

I was really happy when they came out with a Mac version, VMWare Fusion. It was very instrumental in my switching over to the Mac platform. I have to say, that I am quite pleased with how it runs. I really like the Unity interface. (See my MacVista post in this blog) I love the seamless integration. It just plain ROCKS!

OK OK, I’ll stop raving about it, I just wanted to share all of this with you.

GO BUY VMWare Fusion! If you don’t have a Mac, GO BUY A MAC, THEN BUY VMWare Fusion!

See more about switching to fusion: http://www.vmware.com/switchtofusion/

With all that said,  I have need to have some sort of game to play.  So, we decided to try World of Warcraft.  Some of you know, I have been an avid MMO player for over 10 years.  I have played the gamut of them.  From Meridian 59, EverQuest, Earth and Beyond, EVE, Entropia Universe, EverQuest II, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and a host of others.

We pushed back on World of Warcraft because it seemed very easy to play. Almost TOO easy.  Well, I must say, almost a week playing and it IS easy.  However, it’s not so easy that it takes the fun out of the game play.  It’s actually a good balance between ease of play and fun. (get back to me in a couple weeks and I’ll let you know more as well)

We also decided to join a good friend of ours on a PvP server.  I am surprised I went this route, since I am not big into PvP, but the way I look at it, if the PvE play style gets boring to me, I can always PvP.

So, if you are interested in joining us in World of Warcraft or WoW as some call it.  We’re on the Gorgonnash (US) servers and we’re Alliance based.  My in game main character is Zenshinzo.  Send me a tell if you pop in. We’re currently in my friend’s guild. However, as things progress this may change.

Hope to see you!

Here it is:

For some odd reason, my camera imports are acting up. It took 4 or so imports to get most of what you see in the video. As you can see, certain sections of the video there is jitter, I did the best I could. I was planning on doing a time-lapse of the rebuild, but it was just unusable.  So, I added a text ending instead. I hope you like it!

One note on the drive. This drive is 12.5mm vs the 9.5mm most 2.5″ drives are. From my understanding, the Macbook Pro 17″ is the only Macbook that this drive will fit inside.

Anyways, this time I did a Time Machine restore to the drive once installed, and it went flawlessly.

It’s a nice drive, I did the video you see on the Macbook Pro with the new drive in it.

As usual, we plan on referencing our videos on the Techno Chubby Site when it gets up and running.

Good Stuff!

Well, needless to say, I am a space whore.  So, I ordered one from Other World Computing.   I did the Express overnight.  I ordered it yesterday morning, and today, it’s sitting on my desk.  It’s slightly larger than the regular 2.5″ drives.  It’s 12.5mm vs th 9.5mm height that most 2.5′s are.  However, I have done some research and it looks like it will go into a MacBook Pro 17″ with no issues.  I guess we’ll find out.

I am going to install it soon.  I’ll let you know how it all goes.

Here’s the link to what I got: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A53487/

Anyways, I took video of the whole deal. I’ll be working on it at some point this week and get it up on YouTube. It was fairly painless.

After the install, I just did a fresh install from the Leopard disks that came with the system. When it got to the point when it asks if I want to restore an account. I just inserted the old drive in my trusty Thermaltake BlacX and it found all my settings and went to town. It even transferred my VM’s with no issues.

Great stuff!

We’re gonna do some more videos on how to do stuff like get unity working on vmware, install X11, and nvinstaller.

We started to build this monster machine that I thought would handle everything. Theoretically, it would and could but when it came to practice, it just didn’t work out. Here’s the YouTube of where we started with this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcJ45XRNDM

I decided to turn that computer to our media editing machine and it worked fine, but not great. From my perspective, Vista was just not ready to handle the larger demands we were placing on this machine. So, we decided to throw OS X on it. We were quite surprised at how well it worked. So much so that we have decided to move to the Mac platform throughout our household. (As some of you have been reading)

Moving forward, we decided to look into the feasibility of using the Mac platform as our main Media Center that is connected to the living room television. We’re gonna re-configure our big black quad core and set it up and test it. If this works out for us, we’re planning on getting a full Mac Pro and do the same.

Here is the configuration:

Motherboard: Asus Maximus Formula
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Memory: 8 Gigabytes of Corsair DDR2 (4 x 2GB sticks)
Boot Drive: 500 Gigabyte Seagate
Data Drive: 1 Terabyte Seagate
Video: xFx nVidia GeForce 8800GT w/ 512 MB DDR3
NAS: ReadyNAS NV+ w/ 4 x 750 Gigabyte Seagate drives

Operating System: Leopard OS X 10.5.2 via Leo4All (See NOTE)

“Server” Capabilities:

We will configure the DATA drive to do sharing via bonjour and smb to share our data throughout the house computers.

The ReadyNAS NV+ will be set up as our Time Machine backup drive over the network.

We are still looking into several DLNA/uPNP solutions.

This machine will have iTunes library sharing enabled as well.

Software to be installed and configuration:

VMWare Fusion

We will use VMWare Fusion to run various linux and windows VM’s for our needs. The main Windows VM will be running Vista Ultimate and will provide extender capabilities to our Xbox 360′s.

Toast 9 Titanium

We will use Toast with it’s Tivo functionality to pull and archive our favorite TV shows. We will also set up automatic conversion for use on our iphones.

That’s about it. We’re gonna try to do a full video of this when we do it and will add it to the technochubby stuff on YouTube.

Wish us Luck!

NOTE: Yes, we own a full copy of Leopard. We’d also like to point out that this machine is purely for testing. If this meets our wants/needs we will be purchasing a full Mac Pro. (Just like I just finished purchasing a MacBook Pro once I decided the platform was for me)

Also we do own licenses for all the commercial software that we install on our computers.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

I call it “MacVista – Mac on top, Vista on the bottom.” Plus, I am trying out Skitch, a new screen grabber that looks like it has promise.

Now all I need is some sort of Unity mode for Linux in a VM and I can call my machine MacVistux  lol.