MacBook Air Wrap-Up...For Now
OK, so I have had some great opportunities to use the Air as a standard and daily machine. Instead of separating out items, I decided to wrap up individual topics on the Air at least for now with this post...
* I attended a conference recently where I got tired of taking notes and transcribing them later...So, since the MacBook Air fit into my portfolio, I brought it with me. I used this wonderful tool the entire conference, from 8 AM to 5 PM two days in a row...I turned off wireless and bluetooth for the majority of the day and used mostly MS Word 2004. I only turned on Bluetooth and used Safari during 2 segments of about 10 minutes each on both days. I entered the notes into Word and closed the cover when I was not taking notes. The battery lasted the entire day and all sessions on each day. There were no outlets close, so plugging in was not an option. The battery can last, it just needs limited usage and manual power management of closing the cover when not using it.
* There have been many periods where when logging in or opening an application, especially Microsoft Office 2004 applications, the spinning beach ball lasted for a while. I am still trying to figure out what is causing the beach ball. I am still learning about Leopard, so there may be something in the logs that I am missing.
* For BootCamp, I noticed that when I changed our AirPort Extreme router to N only, I was not able to acquire an IP address. So, I have to use the slower G part of the network. Not too bad, but a pain. I will be playing with the settings further to make sure it is not a simple user error, but for some reason it is not connecting at N speeds...The ironic thing is that when I mixed the network, XP indicated that it was connecting at 130 mbps...interesting...
* A couple of harddrive clicks when shutting down have caused some worry, but all seems to be OK. I have run the diagnostics, checked disk permissions, and Onyx to make sure the drive was working OK. So, far, so good, but the sounds have been few and far in between.
* I believe I will be giving up on the virtual software for now as well. BootCamp will have to do even with the incredibly lower battery life...
* Lastly, the size of the hard drive is still a point of concern...While I am far from running out of space, it decreases everyday with podcasts, pictures, as well as personal and professional documents. About 15 GB remain even after splitting out pictures, movies, and most music files to an external drive.
Still excellent machine that I carry all over the house at ease. We'll see how an upcoming flight works out soon as well.
* I attended a conference recently where I got tired of taking notes and transcribing them later...So, since the MacBook Air fit into my portfolio, I brought it with me. I used this wonderful tool the entire conference, from 8 AM to 5 PM two days in a row...I turned off wireless and bluetooth for the majority of the day and used mostly MS Word 2004. I only turned on Bluetooth and used Safari during 2 segments of about 10 minutes each on both days. I entered the notes into Word and closed the cover when I was not taking notes. The battery lasted the entire day and all sessions on each day. There were no outlets close, so plugging in was not an option. The battery can last, it just needs limited usage and manual power management of closing the cover when not using it.
* There have been many periods where when logging in or opening an application, especially Microsoft Office 2004 applications, the spinning beach ball lasted for a while. I am still trying to figure out what is causing the beach ball. I am still learning about Leopard, so there may be something in the logs that I am missing.
* For BootCamp, I noticed that when I changed our AirPort Extreme router to N only, I was not able to acquire an IP address. So, I have to use the slower G part of the network. Not too bad, but a pain. I will be playing with the settings further to make sure it is not a simple user error, but for some reason it is not connecting at N speeds...The ironic thing is that when I mixed the network, XP indicated that it was connecting at 130 mbps...interesting...
* A couple of harddrive clicks when shutting down have caused some worry, but all seems to be OK. I have run the diagnostics, checked disk permissions, and Onyx to make sure the drive was working OK. So, far, so good, but the sounds have been few and far in between.
* I believe I will be giving up on the virtual software for now as well. BootCamp will have to do even with the incredibly lower battery life...
* Lastly, the size of the hard drive is still a point of concern...While I am far from running out of space, it decreases everyday with podcasts, pictures, as well as personal and professional documents. About 15 GB remain even after splitting out pictures, movies, and most music files to an external drive.
Still excellent machine that I carry all over the house at ease. We'll see how an upcoming flight works out soon as well.
Labels: battery life, BootCamp, Mac book air, macbook, Macbook Air, network, review
posted by John E. Murray, III at
9:33 PM
2 Comments:
OK, so I have tried this multiple times, just to make sure...and results have been pretty consistent...so, I have been wondering why the beachball appears too often when I am at home and just turn on the machine...I read somewhere that plugging things into your USB ports or even using a USB hub can cause this...well, it seems to be true with the Air as well. When I start the machine without the hub connected, load time is quicker and either a shorter beachball time or none at all. I now wait to plug in the hub for my external harddrive and ipod.
Enjoy...
Update, update...interesting news that many already know...so, I was worried about my harddrive and the slow log in times with the beach ball...while I thought unplugging the USB drives did the trick, turns out according to the Genuis and a few other posts elsewhere, it could have been that, plus the FileVault that I activated. After removing files and deleting the BootCamp partition, I was able to remove FileVault. This seems to have done it. It seems that the encryption is too cumbersome and is not necessarily needed. While I am getting the harddrive replaced for excessive clicking and a whining noise, the machine and the programs run much quicker without FileVault on.
Enjoy...
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