New 'Book in the House

While not approaching the excitement of a new child in the family, I bit the bullet and ordered a new MacBook Pro earlier this week. The reasons for the bite are rather typical to my earlier transitions between laptops. Old laptop is in shambles from four-plus years of daily use causing me to buy a new one. This is my third laptop. My first was a black G3 233mhz, my second a Titanium G4 667mhz, and now the MacBook Pro.

In typical fashion, I'm not getting the top of the line, though this seems like a big jump from the G4. The G4 was a nice laptop and it really pained me to see it pass. The logic board had failed and the replacement from eBay worked for a few weeks before the laptop started to freak. I can't blame it all on the replacement board, since it now won't even boot. I'm thinking I wore out another component from constant restarting. I'd taken it apart a couple dozen times myself to troubleshoot. There was a point where it worked and booted fine until I moved it. It seemed like the jostling of the computer caused some component to touch something it shouldn't have. Then again, perhaps the logic board was stressed or even a circuit shorted. Either way I had to give up on it. I had wasted alot of time on it and didn't want to throw more cash on a machine that had seen better days. The CD-ROM drive was very flaky and hardly worked with CD's. The replaced hinge held up fine though.

So I scrambled to take advantage of an Amazon $150 rebate and orderd the cheapest MacBook Pro. I'll order an additional 1GB of memory and a second Magsafe power cord for it soon. Shelling out the cash wasn't convenient (with taxes due this week), but it was time. My first inclination was to go with a refurbed PowerBook G4, but the whole Bootcamp release was a deal maker for me. I don't use Windows (Virtual PC actually) that often on my MacMini, but when I need it for testing or to use a Windows-only app, it comes in handy. Having the ability to use Bootcamp or Parallels Virtualization software will be nice.

So the new addition to my Mac lineage will be delivered tomorrow via UPS. I'm slightly paranoid it might have some of the defects I've read about (heat, noise mostly). I'm not expecting either of those two problems, if apparent, will bother me much, but we'll see once I get it running awhile. I'm anxious to get it and set it up over the Easter weekend. My son is looking forward to the built-in iSight camera and PhotoBooth software!

I'm just anxious to have a second dependable machine that makes me more productive and allows me to get my work done. I've been in a funk of sorts over the last few weeks with the PB problems. Transporting my MacMini home each night was a short term convenience for doing work on the weekends or in the evenings, but it's not something I wanted to do forever. Borrowing my wife's 12" PowerBook (which I'm using at the moment) has been nice, but she's tired of me snatching it for a long stretch. And the paltry 256MB of RAM on it keeps me from really getting lots of apps going.

So now I'll probably end up spending lots of bits of time checking on Universal versions of my software and exploring the ways to put Windows on it. I'll post observations over the next couple weeks while I welcome it to the family...