As of Yesterday I have had my Apple MacBook for a week. I say a week, but it's more like a week tomorrow. The reason for this is that I had to take my MacBook in last Saturday to change it as the number 6 key was playing up. They changed the machine without a hitch, and just put my hard drive into the new machine so that I could keep my data. All very well and good but I think that upset OSX a little bit, so yesterday I reformatted my MacBook's HDD and reinstalled Leopard. It is very simple to do. All you need to do is back up all your important data, insert 'MacBook install Disk 1', and select Install OSX and Applications. The MacBook will reboot and you will be brought into the installer, where you select your language, and the disk you want to install Leopard to. You witll be then prompted to select 'Erase and Insta'' for a clean install. Once you've done that, OSX checks the installation media before it does anything so that it is sure the media is clean. Once the installation CD is deemed okay, it goes onto install Mac OS X. Your MacBook will reboot and you will be asked for Disk 2i once it's rebooted. Insert the disk and click OK and setup will continue. Once it's finished, you will see the Leopard Welcome movie (You only ever see this when you start up your MacBook for the first time, or when you clean-install Leopard). You will be then taken through the initial setting up phase that you will have seen when you first bought your MacBook. If there is a wireless network connection available, your MacBook will prompt you to log on to it. If you are authorized to do so, log on to the wireless network, and enter your Apple ID (this will be the same as your iTunes account information). You should then see a screen with your contact details, check this is correct and click next. Next you will be asked to setup a user account. This will entail you typing in a username and a password, and either selecting a user icon, or taking a photo of yourself using the inbuilt iSight camera. Once you've done this, you will be asked to subscribe to .Mac, or to activate your current subscription. If you have a .Mac subscription, activate this now. If you don't, and would like to set one up, you can do this for one year for £70, or you can do as I did and hit Skip. You will then be asked if you would like a free trial of .Mac. Make your choice and click Next. Set up will now tell you that your Mac is ready to use. Click Done and you will be taken to Leopard's desktop. Just to clarify if you bought your MacBook with iLife '08 on it, it will be reinstalled. Ass will the iWork free trial, and the Microsoft Office 2004 free trial.
Now for my review of the MacBook and OSX leopard:
As a Windows user I found it surprisingly easy to move over to OSX. However, I did find the dock confusing at first as some programs live on it if they're open or not. The way to tell if a program oin the dock is open is to check if it has a white dot underneath it (or a black shortcut like arrow on Tiger). On OSX, things seem more logical than Windows, and it all just works. Program installation is easy on OSX. Most programs come on a .DMG file, which when opened, mounts a virtual disk image on the desktop. You open it and it brings up a picture of the program, and the Applications folder, and you just need to drag it onto that image, and it will install itself. For those programs that don't have shortcut to the Applications folder on their disk image however, just open the Applications folder and drag it into there manually. If a program is going to do anything to the system settings, it will ask you for your sudo password.
I bought Parallels Desktop 3.0 and installed Windows XP so that I can run Visual Studio 2008. I hate having to run Windows on a Mac, but then again I do need it for the course. Its better running on Parallels though as Zoom will work with Windows and as it's built into OSX, it doesn't slow the system down like ZoomText 9.1. I am getting to grips with Voice Over because I want blind people to start using Macs as they're cheaper to buy than JAWS itself, let alone a laptop to run it on. I think that Macs are more a people's machine. You can tell all over that Mac OSX was built by humans, for humans. I like it very much and I'm starting to prefer it over my Windows machine.
In other news I bought a Western Digital Elements Go 500GB External hard disk today. The reason being is that I want to take my entire music collections and some videos with me when I travel. I am going home next week as its Easter, and I quite fancy having my music collection and all my Top Gear videos there with me. It works on Windows and OS X 10.3 and above, so I will be able to enjoy all my digital content on my MacBook.
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