Chapomatic

Back when the Thinkpad died I had such a bad time that I decided I would not buy a Lenovo. So, particularly noticing how Windows Vista sounds almost as bad as certain initiatives at work, I went Mac. Herewith my last few days when not taking care of sick kid and tired spouse and other things.

One of the thoughts driving the decision was that Lenovo was a Chinese company, and Apple was Cupertino. So, “buy American” might be a nice idea, right?

Yes, yes, of course the FedEx for the laptop originated in Suzhou, China. So why does Apple say somewhere in a EULA after I buy the machine that I can’t export it? So the Chinese don’t get a couple of hundred to build an X-cluster? The ones they’re building for us? Ecch.

Anyhow. For the price of the previous Lenovo (with enough left over for a game or two and a downpayment for the terabyte hard drive): One Mini, tricked out as far as the standard options allowed; one plain vanilla MacBook, similarly set up. A pair of two GB ram chip sets from Small Dog, because they had a good recommendation and were on sale for less than half what Apple charged (although the smug was a little high on the web site). Barry’s recommendations are certainly spot on; here are some additional things I have learned in my upgrading and migrating and moving and cleaning:

1. Don’t set up a Mac with the same user name as you used to have, then use Migration Manager to

   move the stuff over from your old Mac. It will look fine and then get all wonky after the first reboot. Better to plug in the old machine at the first startup, or use a new user name.

2. I’ve grown to really like the comforting look of verbose startup. It’s UNIX under there, darn it; geek out! Just do
   

   sudo /usr/sbin/nvram boot-args="-v"

   and life is good. This makes every startup and shutdown explain a little better what’s going on in there, and is a code I forget every time I get a new computer to deal with.

3. The time you save migrating things over is more than compensated by figuring out where all the registrations and saved information is for all the other programs who aren’t being nice to me.
4. Don’t try to do a clean OS install on these machines to try to remove unused apps (like I need an iWork trial to fill my machine). The installer puts everything on the machine and you waste your time.
5. Target disk mode doesn’t make the other disks in a tower target disks. You get the one startup disk, and that’s it. Or at least I did.
6. Upgrade the OS before futzing with anything if at all possible. Errors go away if you do.
7. It still sure would be nice to not have to use two hands to “page up”. One nice thing about the Thinkpad was that the arrows were also page up and down, and there were two interstitial keys with “page forward” and “page back” (for browsing) which I liked. As it is I have to find some kind of keymapping program somewhere.
8. It does not make sense that a Treo 650 does not have native Bluetooth support in OS X. There’s a third party hack for forty bucks available, but come on. You expect Macs to be gadget freaks, right?

Hope this at least entertained someone. I like the Macs; they do fine. I’m probably going with Parallels for Windows emulation, and frankly that will only be so I can re-open my huge Outlook email file from back when I emailed a lot of people.

Update: I forgot two things.

• Mike Skallas’ ad blocking hosts file is great stuff.
• TinkerTool is a handy little utility for tweaking all the things I’d normally be trying to remember how to change.