w00t

Came home for the weekend, did some grocery shopping with the wife, and spent part of the evening getting my new MacBook Pro set up. Downloaded FireFox, Adium for chatting (since there’s no Mac version of Trillian) and OpenOffice. Then I grabbed the latest beta for BootCamp, which creates a driver CD so you can run Windows XP on a MacBook Pro. (Yeah I know, sounds silly, running Windows XP on a Mac…) So now I have it set to boot to Mac OS X, and can switch to Windows XP if I need to. Already tested out my Firelite external USB drive (gotta have the music…) This thing has pretty decent speakers for a laptop. I was told by one of the WoW Mac tech support guys that a MacBook won’t do surround sound without an external doohickey. Meh, not for $100.

Of course I had to install World of Warcraft. Downloaded the 1.12 patch, grabbed Cosmos, and fired it up. All details maxed, it seems pretty smooth. Of course I haven’t left Southshore yet. From what I hear, the game should be smooth as glass since I upgraded to 2G RAM.

The mouse will take some getting used to. No problem with the trackpad, but there’s only one button! Mac OS doesn’t use a second button for anything, but WoW does. You have to hit the Apple key as well as the mouse button to do a right click, which is gonna tie my fingers into knots. It also doesn’t do tapping on the pad for selecting stuff, and you use two fingers to scroll. I still have my Logitech mouse at the apartment, and everything I read says a USB mouse “just works.” It also came with a DVI to VGA adapter, despite what the reviews were saying, so I can slap my monitor on it.

The first thing I thought when I opened the box – damn, that screen is huge. I’ve never worked on a widescreen laptop before, and the largest laptop screen I’ve used was a 15″ on a Sony Vaio. (My Tablet PC only has a 13″ screen.) I haven’t tried watching a DVD on it yet, but it comes with a really cool remote that I have got to play with. Hit the button and your desktop flies off into the distance as a media menu comes up. Like, cool… Oh, and did I mention that the keyboard is backlit based on the ambient light? Built in camera?

Most of my time has been spent learning where things are. Applications is like Program Files, System Preferences is kinda obvious. And then there is this odd looking key with an apple and a… well.. it’s a squiggle. It sorta works like a shortcut key. The other thing I am still getting used to is the menus – there’s a menu bar on the top of the screen that changes based on the application you’re running. So, Firefox doesn’t have its own menus, you use the one at the top.

Something I just realized – I’ve had it on for hours now, and the only time I have heard the fan kick on was during a firmware update (and it warned that it would do that.) Just from using it, I haven’t noticed any fans running at all.