New MacBook Pro
Last August 2008 my 3-year warranty expired on my Dell XPS Gen2 laptop with a 2 Ghz Centrino CPU and 2 GBs of RAM. At the time I bought it it was the hottest machine on the market, and I thought for sure in 3 years I would be able to replace it, but last August the World economy was still tanking (and I suppose still is for most people), and I was hesitant to spend for a new laptop when my old one was still getting me by. Besides it still looked like a model from next year.
Yet, a couple of weeks ago it took a nose dive on me and if it wasn’t for CTO Rex Cortez I wouldn’t be anywhere close to having my head back on straight.
After the 100 GB XPS’s hard drive crashed I began scouring Cagayan de Oro for the highest spec laptop in town. There were only two places in town that had a laptop valued at more than 50,000 pesos, the Sony Store in Limketkai Mall, which didn’t have quite the specs I would settle for, and the Digital Hub, upstairs at Limketkai, that specializes in Apple computers and Ipods. They had one MacBook Pro that had 2 GB of RAM and a max screen resolution of 1440 x 900, that they wanted 153,000 pesos for. The Sony I had looked at had a max screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 (HDTV standard) and I had walked away from it, and it was for only 129,000 pesos. I wanted at least 1920 x 1200 like my old XPS had.
As I was about to walk out, wondering where I would go next, the sales-guy tells me he has one MacBook Pro in the back at a special price and perhaps I would like to take a look at it. Since I had no idea where to go next, I told him “okay” expecting to be disappointed yet again, but he walked out and put in my hands a brand new MacBook Pro, dual-core 2.5 Mhz, 4 GB RAM (DDR2 and I was really hoping for DDR3), and wait, it has WUXGA screen resolution, that’s 1920 x 1200 pixels of perfection.
He whispers “122,000 pesos”.
I did the one eye- brow lift Spock intrigue look for him and asked “what’s wrong with it?”
“It has never been out of the box”, he said.
“Let’s fire it up!” I said, and we did.
Now I was really hoping to get an Asus G71 with 64-bit Vista and 8 GB or DDR3 RAM and a quad-core 2 Ghz or 2.2 Ghz CPU, but realizing it would take a month to get one, this Apple notebook began to look pretty precious to me.
It didn’t take long for Daddy to scoop this one up and take it home. (Actually, I went straight to the office to unmask it before Rex, hoping to get his approval.)
I didn’t realize it would take over a week to get XP installed on it, with email up and running and to have it be able to Hibernate. When you run as many applications as I do use your laptop in 3 or 4 places per day, you really do not have time to do a fresh boot every time. Either Standby or Hibernate has to work.
I even got Halo 1 to run on it, uh, just to make sure the video drivers in XP were working properly.
More, probably much more, later.