mikeg's blog

So i sit here in starshmucks, thinking on it (and waiting for my car to be finished at the shop) -- I would like a Core 2 Duo machine (64 Bit goodness, Leopards changing their spots, 802.11 a/b/g(/n?), etc. I also DESPISE (hate, loathe, abhor and revile) this "Glossy Display" thing Apple foisted upon me with my MacBook. Don't get me wrong, it's nice and the color saturation LOOKS better, but the glare from bright lights drives me CRAZY (it's almost unusable in bright sunlight too). The 64MB-Shared-VRAM thing is also irking me (as is the lack of a dedicated pixel shader and vertex engine) - Sure its a step up from the iBook's graphics disaster, but... damnit... WARCRAFT! MacBook Pros have nice dedicated video cards with lots of VRAM (well, 128M or 256M, which is better than a 64M Shared resource-sucker), matte displays (Yay color accuracy! Yay being able to use the laptop in the sun!), and REALLY COOL BACKLIT KEYBOARDS (yeah I know I don't NEED it, but damnit I want it!). The screen is also slightly larger (15" vs. 13.3") and I've discovered that the MacBook's screen doesn't give me the real estate I really want (an extra 2" of diagonal (about 1" Horizontal) would be helpful). MacBook Pros hold up to 3GB of RAM aparently (WtF?) - and thanks to our CTO's obsession with running Activity Monitor (which has rubbed off on me) I have an idea of whats going on on my laptop in terms of RAM Usage - 2G is enough, but the option to go to 3G makes me happy. (There also appears to be a HUGE fucking memory leak in Activity Monitor - I quit and restart it and suddenly I go from 60MB of free RAM to 1GB) The C2D also has more L2 Cache (4M instead of 2M), and by all reports runs COOLER than the Core Duo chips (Less heat = Less fan runtime = Longer Battery Life -- can I squeeze out 4hr regularly?) So I'm almost certainly going to get me a C2D machine. Said machine will be a MacBook Pro (mostly for the graphics card). This leaves the question of when to buy, and what to do with Leela (the MacBook). I've outgrown being a two-computer person (actually it's more that I never use the desktop-machine and it just sucks power at $1024/KW*HR) so I'm considering a Fair-Market sale on eBay (to finance the upgrade), or a fire-sale to some poor soul who wants a semi-dated Mac laptop (poor souls? Anyone?). SpecZors for anyone interested: Model ID (from System profiler): MacBook1,1 2GHz Core Duo (32-bit; Dual-Core; 2MB L2 Cache) 2GB RAM (Max'd) Bluetooth 2.0 AirPort Card (802.11a/b/g) SuperDrive (single-layer) GMA 950 Graphics (64MB Shared RAM) 120GB SATA HD 22 Cycles on battery Not affected by the random shutdown bug, overheating issues, etc. Firmware updates applied.