Mac Heaven

Given that I am starting a new Master's, I needed to purchase a new laptop. My trusty IBM Thinkpad which had served me so faithfully over the course of my undergraduate degree isn't working due to a burnt out LCD screen. Annoyingly the screen went six months after the warranty had expired. The rest of the laptop still works fine though and I have on occasion used it by hooking it up to my desktop monitor. Given the amount of abuse that my IBM went through, I am pretty surprised that it lasted so long. It went through at least 4 long haul flights, being baked in the College storage room for at least a month on two separate occasions while I was traveling, was left on more or less 24/7 during term time, and on one occasion had a glass of water spilt on it (I salvaged the situation by putting it in the airing cupboard in the College laundry room).

Anyhow, I decided to purchase a MacBook and 'go Apple' this time around. I have long been a fan of the superb design values of Apple products (including the iPod). Furthermore, the Mac OS is supposed to be far more stable than Microsoft Windows. Some have complained that it is difficult to use (how come there is no right click button?) but I had little doubt that this was more due to transitioning into a different operating system from one that they were very familiar with rather than any poor design from Apple itself. The clincher to the deal was a student offer giving me a S$450 rebate on a iPod touch if I purchased the laptop and touch together. 

Having had a chance to use the Macbook for around a week now, I can safely say that I am immensely pleased. It definitely took some time to get adjusted to the new system and format, but savvy computer users will appreciate the efficiency of the Mac OS layouts. The general design is also a definite step up as compared to Windows, once you get used to the little quirks (such as having to press an actual physical eject button on your laptop to eject a CD). In sum, I am very much an Apple convert already (and I have barely had a chance to mess with the other applications like the photos, movies and music ones).

The iPod touch is also a wonderful little device though the synching function with iTunes can be a bit annoying at times. It would have been far easier to drag and click music into the iPod individually, if so desired rather than synching it from the iTunes library. A friend of mine informed me that this was possible, but I haven't really messed with the device enough to really work out the little intricacies involved in it.

So far the only gripes have been that I keep getting logged off from my wireless internet whenever the computer goes into sleep mode for some strange reason, and it gets tiresome having to keep typing in the password. Also, the default paper setting for the Brother printer (also recently purchased) isn't A4 but some strange other format - meaning that the first couple of articles I attempted to print got assigned to the trash heap before I worked out what was wrong. But that is probably more a fault with the printer driver than with anything else.

Apple has always created products that are wonderfully designed, fantastic to look it, and in many ways also very functional. Macs have far less worms and viruses to worry about as compared to Windows (primarily because Windows is by far the more common platform and most worms and viruses are written for Windows code) and the OS is on the whole very stable. At this rate, I can safely say that I will be a Mac user for a long long time to come.

Malicious Worm

My computer has been the unfortunate recipient of a worm that was sent via MSN Messenger (from my mother). It has meant that not only Messenger but Firefox and Explorer are no longer functional on my desktop. I have never truly realised my dependence on the internet till now and my annoyance is profound.

Part of the irritation stems from the fact that I really should have known better than to download the file and try to run the application. In my defence, I was multi-tasking at the time and I am inured to my mom sending me nonsense over Messenger. So perhaps the old joke and men and their inability to do more than one thing at one time is true.

How I am managing to write this post then? Well, given that only my desktop is affected I contrived to connect my laptop to my monitor and run the internet from there. My laptop is still functional except for the minor issue of the screen not working at all. I am running this jury-rigged system until I can figure out how to solve the worm issue on my desktop. Suggestions are welcome.