Not that anyone cares, but I thought I’d post my current computer setup, hardware and software…

The Hardware

I’m the kinda guy that enjoys the bleeding edge (first mac was a 867mhz pb), so five days after Apple released the new Macbook I had my company order one for me. I got a stock black Macbook from Apple, and ordered 2gb of ram and a 120gb sata laptop drive from a third party retailer (can’t remember who)…

The day after the Macbook arrived my memory and harddrive showed up and I installed them. Needless to say, I will never own a Mac with less than 2gb of ram after experiencing the difference between 512mb and 2gb.

This computer is fast, really really fast, and the 120gb of harddrive made it more than comfortable for having my entire music/photos/movies collection on my laptop, instead of just my desktop machine at home.

The iSight camera is really nice too, although I haven’t really started using it for video conferencing yet.

I love having the black Macbook, but I don’t have anything against the white ones, they are really slick too. The black one does tend to show any grease transferred from your hands, which could drive someone with OCD nuts.

Software

Well first off, I’m running OS X 10.4.8 now.

In addition I bought Parallels and I’m running Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu . I use VirtueDesktops to keep everything clean and easily switch between my OS’s. It is really a thing of beauty and I love to show it off to my clients and of course other geeks (I had it all setup when I went to “RailsConf”http://railsconf.org , so that was fun, being that only a few people out of the 100+ people with Macbooks had the same setup).

I use iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD quite regularly. I gave Apple Mail a spin but ended up back with the Gmail web interface as my preferred mail client.

For coding I use Textmate and IMHO there is nothing better.

In addition to these I use Gcal (a webkit based Google Calendar client), Firefox 1.5.0.7 , Safari , Stickies , NetNewsWire Lite , Terminal, and a handful of other apps.

Problems/Issues

I’ll finish this post off by mentioning some of the hardware issues I’ve experienced with my macbook.

The first was an inconvenient problem with the gloriously large trackpad. Due to its large size, and the poor (i hate to say poor, but how else can i describe it?) trackpad button design, the button would only work if I clicked within an inch of the center, this after two weeks of use. I found a nice little remedy (via google) using some origami , and it hasn’t been an issue since.

The last and worst issue I can remember is when I got the random macbook shutdown problem . Four weeks after I started using my macbook it started shutting down whenever it felt like, fortunately it seemed to do it more at night and not during work hours. But after a few days it was doing it all the time. I called Apple and started going thru their annoying diagnostics, installing the factory ram, installing the factory harddrive, reinstalling the OS, etc etc. Finally I got an RMA and sent it in. BUT, it tool 16 day for them to get it back to me, which was extremely annoying, especially after being assured it would be back in 7 days.