Stupid Apple

Oh Apple, why must you break my heart? As anybody who has ever seen me with my laptop knows, I am in lurve with my MacBook. It’s pretty, it’s cool, it’s fast, and it has opened up a different world of computing. My geeky soul finds this deeply satisfying. So why did Apple have to go and release pretty much MY computer with an updated screen, built-in card reader, and lower price? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

That is so not cool. Right now, I’m weighing my options. Should I make a fuss with Apple? I do enjoy my computer, and I just bought the MacUpdate bundle, so for the last day I’ve been playing around with Parallels 4 and Windows 7. (As an aside, I cannot say enough good things about this bundle. Even if the rest of the apps sucked, which they don’t, Parallels 4 would make the whole thing worthwhile, as it retails for $79.99 and the bundle was only $49.99.) It’s been nice to use my multitouch gestures on the Windows platform, or switch back and forth between Leopard and Windows 7.

But why in the name of all that is holy did Apple have to do this to me? Couldn’t they have waited at least one year? I’m finding it different to read the reactions on Engadget and Gizmodo. The commenters at the former seem more down on Apple, while people more fanboyish seem to frequent the latter.

Really, I was looking forward to today’s announcements because I thought they were going to announce a new iPhone. They did, the iPhone 3GS, and it’s totally underwhelming. It’s faster, but it still lacks a camera, AT&T is being slow to add MMS support, and they’ve said nothing about officially sanctioned tethering, even though other international iPhone carriers are supporting it immediately. Wake me when the HTC Touch Pro 2 is released. Also of interest is the announcement that Snow Leopard will be available starting in September, and that the upgrade will cost only $29.

There goes that

I deleted the Windows 7 partition on my Macbook because I found it annoying and almost never actually used it. Plus, it slowed my boot time to an unmanageable minute, from a previous low of about 12-15 seconds. Unacceptable. I thought that it would be kind of a tedious process, but the whole thing took about 10 seconds in Boot Camp. I continue to be astounded by this operating system. I still have Windows 7 on my Gateway, and plan to play around with it some more this weekend, as I have been quite remiss. Even the new, shiny beta operating system doesn’t really make me want to use the older computer that much…

And now that I found boxee, and can watch my Netflix instant access content on the Macbook, the other computer is even less useful to me.

Windows 7? On my PC? It’s less likely than you think!

Because it was so easy to put Windows 7 on my MacBook, I was sure that it would be at least as simple to do so on my Gateway pc. I mean, Gateways are native Microsoft environments, so what could possibly be so difficult, right? WRONG. It turns out that Vista sucks every bit as much as you may have heard, and so, instead of being able to partition my hard drive and make space for Windows 7, I have just spent large chunks of the last three days figuring out how to partition my hard drive. I had 113 GB of free space on the drive, and Vista said that a grand total of 98 MB of that was available to be partitioned.

So what was the problem? Vista has built-in software to do partition drives, but the way that it stores system files means that all my free space is basically worthless. Vista’s default storage area for system files is at the very end of the hard drive, which means that you can’t lop off any part of the drive until you’ve moved those system files further in. It’s not hard to fix, but you can’t do it with tools provided within Vista.

Here’s the tutorial that I used to figure out what to do. Some notes: I used PerfectDisk2008 with no problem (there are many versions of PerfectDisk to choose from when you get to that web site). When you’ve finished the regular defrags, choose the System Files option in PerfectDisk. This will require a restart of your system, but took less than 5 minutes on my system. I went from seeing 3 GB of space (after I deleted my pagefile) to over 100 GB.

I’m having some of the same trackpad issues with Windows 7 on my MacBook that others have had, which is one of the reasons I wanted to try Windows 7 on my pc laptop. I’ll use it for a couple of days and then give my thoughts on both experiences.