Things that suck about your MacBook Pro that no one will tell you about

I have a Core Duo model and am running windows (w/ bootcamp), so some of this stuff probably doesn’t apply but …

1. The hard drive is painfully slow. When you go to delete something, you can sit there for a good 5 seconds before the delete dialog is gone

2. You can only run an external 2.5 inch hard drive off one particular USB port (the one to the right) … if you put it on any other port, it will not get enough power and be stuck powering up then powering down. Or it will power up and stay fine for a bit, until it suddenly starts experiencing the situation I’ve described.

3. Maximum installable RAM … 2 Gigabytes.
god.

4. While you can get up to 4 hours of power running OS X on the battery … you’ll barely get 2 hours running Windows.

note: This is a late night rant … I love my darling MacBook Pro.

How to run a Webkit Nightly build on windows.

This is very straight forward, but for those who think it might be complicated. Here is all it entails.

inside a webkit nightly build folder Continue reading

How to get rid of the Automatic updates nag “Do you want to restart your computer now?”

Just a quick note to help folks who want to get rid of the annoying restart prompt that keeps popping up after an automatic update has installed.

  • Press the windows button and R (windows button + R) for the run prompt
  • If you’ve done this before the command will be pre-filled … if it isn’t then type in
  • net stop “automatic updates” <——— note the quotes?

Do you want to restart your computer now?

Remember … you really should restart your computer after an update has installed. So make sure you do that eventually.

PS: Starting certain applications will cause the automatic update service to start running again and the nag will come back. Just Rinse and repeat 🙂

Broken Safari for windows.

Safari for Windows (3.0.4) became my current favorite browser by (to my trained eye) slaughtering Opera in Javascript performance.
Hopefully that changes with Opera 9.25. Of late though, I’ve been having trouble with it. Safari initially broke on my Windows Laptop a few weeks ago, popping up a debugger prompt and closing immediately if I cancelled out of it.It kept running on my main workstation, however … that is until this evening, now its doing the same on my desktop.
I realize how poorly supported this browser is, because there is no place to file a bug report except from in the browser itself. Shouldn’t there be an active bug database or something for Safari on windows?

If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know … I want my super fast javascript back!
[Click on Images to see bigger versions]

Broken Safari

Visual Studio debugging Safari Crash

How to solve problem with USB devices not responding on resumption from standby in Bootcamp.

So … I’m running Windows XP on a 17″ Macbook Pro with Bootcamp …
Every now and then, when I put the laptop on Standby and try to resume work from where I left off, the USB devices stop responding all together.
This is a big problem for me, since

  • I put my laptop in and out of standby several times a day
  • work off an external 250GB Hard drive.
  • am pretty hopeless without a wireless mouse

I poked around online, but didn’t really find anything on Google or at the Apple bootcamp forum.
So I decided to try fixing it on my own. Continue reading