Wayne Priestley

I’ve not had much of a chance to get online lately as my Macbook Pro has been away being fixed or so I thought.

In June I started to notice problems with the connection speed between my MBP and Time Capsule.
In the beginning I thought the problem was to do with my Time Capsule, so after a bit of trouble shooting involving formatting and changing of settings without any change I did a bit of a comparison on speeds with @PatMahon.

Still no joy so it was time to give Apple a call and get some use from my Applecare policy.
After going over a few details of my issue with them we decided it was not a Time capsule issue as first thought but it was in fact a problem with my MBP, specifically the Airport card.

Getting to this conclusion was now quick or easy by any means, apart from the obvious ping tests and testing on a clean user account etc I did a archive and install of the OS, then a complete clean install…

Still no improvement.

So off my MBP went to Apple to be fixed, all boxed up and off it went.
A few days later I received a phone call from Group 8 (the company carrying out the repairs) they asked me a few questions and decided to replace the Airport card.

I happened to be on holiday so I had a bit of a wait until I got the MBP back.

Unfortunately once I had reinstalled my account from my backup I noticed that it was not in fact fixed, it was to tell the truth now worse than before.

Back on the phone to Applecare and I explained the situation was now worse than before, I had one more test to do…

Boot from the instal DVD and ping test, this confirmed once more that it was not a software issue.
I was sent a program by Apple that gathered some info and this was sent to Apple for the engineers to take a look at.

So here I am waiting for a reply from them to find out what is to happen next, I imagine that my MBP will be returned and ill be back to using my iPhone for a while.

I would suggest reading the post below this one-first to familiarise yourself with the story so far.

As I was saying, I had decided to get myself a new MBP and give my Son the one I have now.

I was happy with this decision until I saw a few tweets from @Gazmaz about his predicament, he considering a iMac buy then started considering the idea of a Mac mini and a 24″ Apple display.

So this got me thinking once more, shall i get the cheaper 15″ MBP and a 24″ Apple display to give me way more real estate along with duel monitor set-up…

Then along came @DonMcAllister with his explanation of how he went from deciding to buy a Mac mini and ended up ordering a Mac pro…

So, so far I’ve gone from a Mac Mini to a iMac for my son.

Then to a new 17″ MBP for me, and giving my Son my old 17″ MBP.

Then to a new 15″ MBP and an Apple 24″ LED display.

But it didn’t stop there however, I use my MBP to make home movies with Final Cut Express, and organise my pictures with Aperture 2, and I’m starting to use pixelmator and a few other apps more often that require some serious hardware to get the best out of them.

So getting the 17″ MBP with 4GB of Ram as standard would be the way to go as it gives me the option to upgrade to 8GB and put in a SSD in the future.



Now this along with the 24″ display, Apple keyboard and AppleCare is going to cost a little more than I have available at present to invest.

So my plan is that in a few more months, I shall take another look at the 17″ MBP along with the 24″ Display and see how the finances are….

You can be sure that I’ll be posting my final decision once the time comes

My decision was simple.

Wait until the Mac Mini was updated by Apple and buy one for my Son who is using an old desktop PC with windows XP Pro installed.

The PC is about 5 years old and over the last 12 months it’s started to show signs of its age, and as I want to eventually switch all the family over to using Mac’s I don’t see any point in spending money upgrading the PC.

So when Apple finally updated the Mac Mini I was all ready to buy, until that is I had reason to visit the Apple Store in Liverpool to have a repair done on my daughters Macbook.



I took the chance to get a good look at all the new Apple hardware on display and have a bit of a play.

I was immediately impressed with the 24″ Apple LED displays.
With the LED backlight the images on the screen seemed to pop out at you, and the size…. Well, a bit overwhelming after sitting in front of the 17″ display on my Macbook Pro.

Even though the spec’s of the Mac Mini were given a serious rev, I still wasn’t sure how long my Son would get full use out of it as he likes his games on the PC, and for this reason XP will be getting installed on his Mac.

Because of the price increase in the Mac mini I started the think that after a few upgrades to the basic Mini, that the iMac was starting to look a pretty good deal.
And this is how the whole process started to get out of control, but more on that later.

I was so impressed by the service I received from the guys at the Apple store, even though the Macbook was out of warranty, I left the store and made my way home feeling quite good.

It was on the drive home when I started thinking about my options and how best to address the need of my Son and his new Mac.

At present I have a 2007 MBP with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 3GB of RAM installed.

It’s an extremely powerful machine and way out performs his current desktop PC as you could imagine.

So that got me thinking.
Why not get myself one of those new MBP’s and pass my current MBP along to my Son.

Good idea, I decided I would do this.

To be continued……….

Found some nice FREE Wallpaper for my Mac from Minimamente.

They’ve got all the most common resolutions available:

1280 × 1042
1600 × 1200
2560 × 1600

There are 8 color variations in total so finding one you like shouldn’t be difficult.
Mine is set to change the Wallpaper every 15 minutes.

Here is the direct download link from the Apple website.

Trying to have a video conversation with someone on a PC when your on a Mac isn’t as easy as you’d think.

I spent a few hours on this problem to help my daughter talk to her friends on their PC’s from her Mac.

After Googling, and spending a few hours searching through the results and going to links suggested by Twitter users I ended up looking at aMSN, after a recommendation by @SwitchMac.

I was a little confused at first, thinking he was talking about MSN for Mac.
After heading over to their site I downloaded the software and installed it on her Mac.

It’s not the fastest messenger app, nor is it the best looking UI, but it’s not even up to version 1 yet so give it a little time and there should be some nice improvements such as audio conversations.

After a few minutes it was installed and she was up and running.
Starting a video chat was straight forward once she found a friend willing to have a video chat.

I was surprised that aMSN hasn’t been blogged about a little more as it’s a very simple way of Video chatting with Pc users.

It has some plugins available along with some different skins so you can customize the look to the way you like.

So the new Mac Mini is here and now I have to decide if I should hit that purchase button or not.

The decision should have been simple, buy a Mac Mini for my Son (his first Mac) and buy a Mac Mini to use as a media center.

So I was all ready and just needed Apple to update the Mini and I was sorted.
But along with the update came the price increase…..

Now there’s a spanner in the works, two Mac Mini’s will cost me £1000.00 Hmmm.
A 20″ iMac for my Son will be a little less than that and he gets a monitor keyboard and mouse thrown in.

I’d have to do without the media center but I could live with that (I think).

Or do I wait a while and try to get two refurbished Mac Mini’s from Apple?

It’s something I’m going to have to think about for a few weeks.

On a side note… Have Apple increased the Mac Mini price so it’s not so appealing as an alternative to the Apple TV, as the UK price difference between the 160GB Apple TV and Mac Mini was only £130.00 now its £240.00……..

Two books I’ve been waiting for have arrived from Amazon today.
Dot robot written by Jason Bradbury and The Cult of Mac by Leander Kahney.

Dot.com billionaire Devlin Lear, founder of the top-secret defence force Mex, has been watching Jackson Farley. He knows he has found a digital genius.
Along with three other brilliant gamers from different corners of the world, Lear wants Jackson to join him and stop the criminal heist of the century using the most highly advanced state-of-the-art-robots ever invented.

The Macintosh is more than a computer it’s a way of life…
This book is about what it is to be a Macintosh person.
It gives insight into the greatest love and loyalties of any product of our era.

The Dot Robot is a book for my 10 year old Son, but I admit I’ll be reading it myself after he’s done reading it.

The Cult of Mac is without question for me. I’ve been waiting for the movie to appear on iTunes here in the UK but so far without any Luck.

I will be posting an update when I’ve read them and let you know what I thought.