Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Macbook Pro hiccups -- Comment()
After using the new Macbook Pro for two weeks of so, I have mostly good experiences, but also some problems have turned up.

What is interesting about the MBP is that when you are using it, it seems quite large, even big - plenty of room for typing, using the trackpad and working on the screen - but when you look at the machine, especially closed, on a table, it seems small, almost diminutive. It is probably the rounded edges and the aluminium color which produce this effect.

The problems which I have had are twofold. I'm using the machine lid closed on my desk, connected to an external display and through a USB 1.0 hub to a keyboard and a mouse. (The MBP needs to be connected to the power supply to use the machine like this - this is the same as with the TiBook.)

I had a single instance when the machine was not waking up when pressing the mouse button or keys on the external keyboard. Fortunately, this problem never appeared again.

But there is another problem which appears once in a while. When woken from the sleep, the external display starts to switch on, goes off, wakes again, goes off, etc. The display does not function properly until disconnected and reconnected, or until the display (not the MBP) is put to sleep and then waken up. You can use define the "sleep display" command to one of the corners of the screen to do this easily.

Perhaps connected to this "waking display" problem is the occasionally slow startup when connected to a video projector - my old TiBook can do it faster. But this doesn't happen always, and may be due to some software settings (PowerPoint of the new MS Office etc.).

I would imagine these problems will soon be fixed in a software update. At least they are quite minor, and don't much diminish the joy of using the MBP.