In 2008, I purchased a MacBook Pro laptop to help me with my photography editing to replace to old PC which I had since I was in university which was dated back to 2004. The Macbook Pro has served me well and it still does till today. So well that I am writing this blog post using this Mac.

Why am I writing this on my Mac when I have a nice spanking PC that I bought last year to replace my old one to play games such as Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 but up until 2 hours ago, it just died on me. It refuses to start up and boot up so I am really hoping that the hard disk is ok. Its so frustrating dealing with PC's, constantly have to figure out whats wrong with it, frequently crashes (mind you I am running on Windows 7 and I don't overclock the PC at all).

Anyhow I am just venting my frustrations online now because I can't play my usual dosage of Starcraft 2 and perhaps put in a couple of Warden/Butcher runs in Diablo 3 (I kinda suck at Diablo 3 and I am now stuck in Act 1 in Inferno). Hopefully when I bring my PC into C-Zone tomorrow at Digital Mall, I should be able to get it fixed fast enough so I can also head over to Sunway for a talk by ATP Motorsports.

While I am here sitting at home being frustrated, I just wonder, since the games I play are also available on the Mac, it would have been the wiser choice to just use a fully Mac environment at home. Host my Plex server on a Mac (which is a lot more stable than my PC) and combine all my gaming and photo editing on a single platform. I was thinking an iMac but personally, I feel that the iMac can't deliver the power I might want especially on a  nice and large 27" sized monitor. But hey, an iMac is pretty pricey and since I just bought my PC not too long ago, so I will have to make do with what I have left.

Ah, it reminds me of the days when I was overclocking my PC and letting the cool 5 degrees celcius air of Sheffield cool my PC down. Now it is just a real bother to take my PC out and try to figure out and trouble shoot the errors.

Maybe I am just getting too old for this shit and all I want is convenience.

Last night as I was trying to fight the after effects of jet lag (thanks to my 28-hour door to door journey from Chicago to KL), I saw that Steve Jobs has indeed released Lion and it was available in it's new form which was a downloadable update via the App Store. I am for one, am glad that the update came in the form of the App Store and it was easily downloadable. All I needed to do was fire up my Unifi connection and then download the package.

Now this was a huge difference from my experience about two weeks back when my home PC decided to die on me after a good 6 years (yes, the motherboard failed on me) and I decided to rebuild a whole new PC. Together with that set up, I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and the whole process of installing everything again took a good long day. What I didn't mention was that the guy at Compu-Zone was trying to figure out why the DVD writer driver couldn't be detected. After troubleshooting almost every component in the PC, the fault laid with the power supply.

What I am trying to point out is that, even with my old Macbook Pro 2008 model, the whole installation was fast and easy. It took me around 20-30 minutes to download Lion, and another 20 minutes to install it over my existing Snow Leopard installation. At the end of the day, I was very impressed and more so impressed by the price tag. USD$29,90 for the entire Operating System. I just paid like RM400 for my copy of Windows 7 and yet Apple has done it again with it's low price.

By the time the installation was completed, I managed to fiddle around with the new OS and the two most impressive thing that I enjoyed was Launchpad and Mission Control. Definitely a good way or sorting out my Apps, previously I would always curse trying to find out apps which I installed but totally forgotten about. Unfortunately for me as well, I can't utilize multi gestures due to the fact that my Macbook Pro was made in the dinosaur ages hence that is one thing I have yet to experience.

Perhaps a new Macbook Air might do the trick but as much as I would love one of those, I really can't justify the need for one.

 

 

 

 

To be completely honest, I have a desktop sitting at home which serves me more as a multimedia device. Its exactly almost 3 years old running on an old Core Duo processor at 2.13Ghz. Previously it has been running on Windows Vista Home Premium edition and I never had any issues with it because I hardly use the machine for any serious work. This is until Starcraft 2 came into mind and I installed the game and started playing it.

That was when all of the problems started to appear. The game was quite slow, at first I blamed it on my old PC specs and I haven't had the cash to upgrade it. Well, I just can't bring myself to spending so much cash on upgrading a perfectly working machine. Another problem I kept getting was that Vista kept crashing my Starcraft 2 and after trying to reinstall the game again, I just couldn't do it! I blamed it on the game at first, because in order to install the game, I had to be connected to the internet which somehow my Vista's protocol was preventing the game from detecting the internet.

Well after a long hard consideration, I went ahead and reformatted my PC, installed Windows 7 on it and am loving it. Starcraft 2 seems to be able to play much smoother now. To be honest, I actually installed XP on it first but the copy of XP I had was a little too old which didn't have any of my hardware drivers which meant I couldn't connect to the internet to download them. After a painful weekend of installing it, I am quite pleased with Windows 7. Its a pity that I only have the 32-bit version with me, otherwise I would have installed the 64-bit version and fully utilize the 4Gb of RAM I have installed.

At the moment I am still keeping this machine clean, only installed Google Chrome, Open Office, Alvira AntiVirus and VLC player. I guess those are the softwares I pretty much need at the moment.

Can't wait to get a new replacement office laptop fitted out with Win 7. My current one is still running on XP.



Not too bad for a 3 year old PC scoring a 5.4 on the Windows Experience Index.

Update:
Check out this commercial for the new Windows 7 phone.

Update: I had to include the last link into this week's Wednesday Clicks

I guess if there were any other posts here, this blog would then be called the Wednesday Clicks blog. Anyway, let me start off first with a little bit of what has been happening. I read a food review about Popeye's latest fast food chain here the other day and was extremely curious about the food. Usually I trust certain food reviews but me being a fast food junkie, I headed there last night and decided to try their fried chicken. My review about it? Well, the food is not going to lure me there as I really felt that it was just "so-so". Nothing spectacular about it and since it is located in the busy area of Taman Tun Dr. Ismail, I doubt that I would be there anytime soon.

Back to the clicks.

• Two stunning image galleries on the aeriel view of London by night as well as msnbc's image gallery.


• A lawyer and a journalist has a difference of opinion. Conspiracy theories anyone?


• Check out the amazing new movie trailers that were released during Superbowl weekend. My personal favourites were that of "Angels and Demons", "Transformers 2", "G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra", "Star Trek" and "Monsters versus Aliens".


• Are you finding that your iPhone backup takes longer than usual after updating to the latest 2.1.1 firmware?


• Just when you thought that Windows 7 was supposed to be an improved version of what Vista was supposed to be, Microsoft is making all the same mistakes again.


• The best of dumb questions and answers at Yahoo! Answers. Definitely worth a click!

More posts coming soon!