Chris Saul's Blog

Monday June 09, 2008

Apparently settling down with my new Mac

Getting to grips with my Mac a bit better this evening.

Some gripes still -

I don't like all these keyboard shortcuts I have to use and the position of the Apple key and not being able to use ctrl instead. It doesn't suit my hands, which are used to doing things differently as opposed to thinking different.

The mouse seems to slow down when moving over links. I also find highlighting things frustrating.

Still hating the lack of a del key - fn delete doesn't cut it. Same goes with the page up and down keys and shortcuts.

It doesn't really seem much faster than my four year old Toshiba, which surprises me considering it has a processor that's so much quicker. Maybe the tasks I'm doing are more disk bound than anything else - launching apps for example. That said, it does seem slower when multiple apps are open and I'm switching from one app to the next, something which has nothing to do with disk speed.

Doubtless I'll switch my old laptop on over the weekend to make sure I've copied everything across and find myself railing at the slow old thing and irritating XP it runs.

More Mac irritations

More Mac whinges.

Earlier this evening I installed Thunderbird and Firefox and used them both happily. Now their icons have disappeared from the dock and I can't find them.

Safari doesn't work with my bank's online password entry system.

The left side of the Mac is extremely warm and the right hand side is cool after being left on for four hours. This makes typing feel horrible - my left palm is sweaty and my right palm is fine. Yuck.

It's a lot hotter than my Toshiba ever got underneath as well - my suit trousers will lose their crease if I need to adjust my presentation on my knees moments before a critical presentation :) Maybe newer laptops are just like this, but I thought the new Centrinos were meant to be more power efficient. There seems to be no fan going on to cool the thing down. I'd prefer even temperatured hands if it meant a bit of fan noise.

Where's the 'del' key?