MacBook Pro Unibody Living with it on a day to day basis.

[DYER]

Right then I have been meaning to write this for a while but never got round to it.
I thought I would post all of the issues I have had with it since I got it on the 31st of October.
First I would like to say I am happy I made the switch from PC to Mac and I am happy with my MBP in most respects.
First off I was quite lucky cosmetically the only problem I have is a loose batterey cover but I aim to go into the Regent street store soon and ask for a manager and see if I can just swap my Battery cover for that of one of the Mac's that are on display (cheeky but it will solve my problem fast and the manager of the store a lot of grief )
My screen is good and so is the keyboard.

The one thing I find odd is when using it on my lap I get cramps in my arms a lot when typing a lot and using the trackpad which I never had before.
Now to problems I have had with OSX
I frequently get OSX to crash and need to restart. This happens most often when I yank my ipod off my table unplugging it. This is really annoying as my old PC's never ever had this issue. They would complain about incorrectly ejecting hardware but like I care.

I cannot get iMail to download my emails. It will load them but leave them on my Server. This is a real pain as it means I have to have Entourage intalled to take them off the server (this is important as IMO the longer they are on the server the longer they are accessible to people who shouldnt have access to them)

The screen flickers when on low brightness when it is set to automatic.. I solved this by manually controlling it but as you can guess it is still a bit of a pain.

The battery life is appauling.
I get 2.5 hours on the proper graphics card whilst running mundane stuff like iphoto or lightly using PS
I get 4 hours if I am lucky with the 9400 M whulst word processing with the backlight on minimum

It could be faster. I do not know why but it doesnt seem that fast. I have the 2.8 Ghz processor and 7200 rpm 320 gig drive and it just isnt as zippy as I thought it would be.

Also it get's real warm when using photoshop and IMO the fans are not spinnig fast enough but I am yet to find a program to let me control the fan speed.

Safari is slow at loading pages so is Mozilla Firefox however when booted in XP IE7 is faster WTF is that about???
Other than that OSX is ok allthough needs some getting used to.

Windows is a pain. And I only use it for gaming...
Windows is fast. REAL FAST faster than most windows rigs I have used which is great. BUT it gets real hot. I am talking so hot you do not want to touch it. Whilst playing a bit of Tiberium Wars The laptop frequently crashed im guessing due to it overheating but that is a bit erratic. The fans spin at full pelt and it sounds like my MBP is about to take off but it doesnt help. This is poor design IMO or we need updated windows drivers heck just using the 9400M would be a step in the right direction as I really do not need the 9600M GT when playing CSS allthough I do for C&C

Other than that I cannot reccomend the new MBP enough.
It's efficiency with CS4 design premium is absaloutely wonderfull.
Even if it is not as fast as I thought it would be I still think it was worth the money and I am looking forward to buying the 24 inch LED display.

If anyone finds any fixes to the above post them here as i am sure itd help me and others with the same issues
regards to u all
chris

 

[jgo78]

what kind of flicker is it? pls describe

 

[DYER]

what kind of flicker is it? pls describe

God erm basically its a pulse type of flicker if you know about photography its the difference of about 0.0-0.3 exposure compensation but it variates within that range. It only happens when it set to auto screen brightness never when its set to the same amount manually. its a fast pulse than and flipping annoying.

 

[rolex54]

for the automatic brightness the sensor is probably just picking up changing light constantly and it continues to change the brightness, do yourself a favor and just manually adjust it.

Battery life is what it is, nothing you can do about it, its a powerful, thin laptop, and the 9600M needs a lot of power.

SMCfancontrol will let you adjust your fan speeds.

As for OSX crashing, that is very abnormal, but you should also wait till the drive is ready to be ejected, and not just pull it out.

There is no real reason why safari should be slower, so idk what the problem is there...

 

[jgo78]

God erm basically its a pulse type of flicker if you know about photography its the difference of about 0.0-0.3 exposure compensation but it variates within that range. It only happens when it set to auto screen brightness never when its set to the same amount manually. its a fast pulse than and flipping annoying.

i get the same thing, when the computer is cold and the screen is on low brightness either on auto or manual it flickers, pulses as if the refresh rate is off. After awhile (5-10 min) it goes away though. I hate it. But if i turn brightness to half or greater you don't notice it at all.

 

[DYER]

for the automatic brightness the sensor is probably just picking up changing light constantly and it continues to change the brightness, do yourself a favor and just manually adjust it.

Battery life is what it is, nothing you can do about it, its a powerful, thin laptop, and the 9600M needs a lot of power.

SMCfancontrol will let you adjust your fan speeds.

As for OSX crashing, that is very abnormal, but you should also wait till the drive is ready to be ejected, and not just pull it out.

There is no real reason why safari should be slower, so idk what the problem is there...

Thanks for that I shall check some of that out. On smc fan controll I couldnt get that to work it sais my mac isnt compatible

 

[DYER]

i get the same thing, when the computer is cold and the screen is on low brightness either on auto or manual it flickers, pulses as if the refresh rate is off. After awhile (5-10 min) it goes away though. I hate it. But if i turn brightness to half or greater you don't notice it at all.

mine does it all the time i shall now check what rolex said to see if it does indeed happen in certain light condition he may be onto a point withthat as i only notice during lectures not at home or work

 

[rolex54]

Thanks for that I shall check some of that out. On smc fan controll I couldnt get that to work it sais my mac isnt compatible

yeah it basically lies, it does work, you just have to press accept or whatever when it gives you that message... I use it on the same computer, so I know it works...

 

[daneoni]

Either the auto brightness feature is confused or you possibly have a faulty inverter board?...unlikely but possible.

As for cramps its probably your hands re-adjusting/getting used to the new keyboard/trackpad

Its probably not as fast to you because some apps cant take advantage of all the perks such as SSE4 of the CPU yet. Also maybe because you have a relatively fresh system so OS X may still be caching you stuff. Either that or you're used to desktop power on windows which will always be faster than any notebook

As for the crashes you might want to reset the IO catalogue i.e. SMC/PRAM resets

 

[firesong]

And for battery life and CPU temperature in Windows, note that Windows isn't power efficient at all, not by a long shot.

Even someone whom I know who's got a hackintosh (taboo I know, but important for this point) on a windows laptop finds much better battery life on that Vaio booting OS X than Windows.

 

[MowingDevil]

I frequently get OSX to crash and need to restart. This happens most often when I yank my ipod off my table unplugging it. This is really annoying as my old PC's never ever had this issue. They would complain about incorrectly ejecting hardware but like I care.

This one, I think the problem is you but I think you know that. How hard is it to "eject" a device before unplugging it? Takes a quick moment and might save damage to your device.

Have a look around preferences in Mail, there should be an option to delete the files from your server when they've been downloaded to your computer. I think its "removed unedited downloads:" and you can choose never/after mail quits/after message is deleted." Thats the closest I could find to it, it used to be "leave downloaded messages on server" in the past or on other programs.
Under "mailbox" in the menu bar you can choose to "erase deleted mail" --> "in all accounts" or choose a specific account and that will permanently get rid of anything that's deleted in the Mail program.

Longer battery life would be hella nice. No way have i been able to get the time they promote.

 

[DYER]

yeah it basically lies, it does work, you just have to press accept or whatever when it gives you that message... I use it on the same computer, so I know it works...

Hi there it sais it is not supported and then the only place you can quit is "I will quit" then it just quits and i get no further options... any ideas?

 

[DAAAAAAAVE]

I have been using http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23137
should fix your heat problems

 

[DYER]

Either the auto brightness feature is confused or you possibly have a faulty inverter board?...unlikely but possible.

As for cramps its probably your hands re-adjusting/getting used to the new keyboard/trackpad

Its probably not as fast to you because some apps cant take advantage of all the perks such as SSE4 of the CPU yet. Also maybe because you have a relatively fresh system so OS X may still be caching you stuff. Either that or you're used to desktop power on windows which will always be faster than any notebook

As for the crashes you might want to reset the IO catalogue i.e. SMC/PRAM resets

Hi there was in a lecture this morning and it seems things are due to the fluroscent lights in here.
I have heard this may be an issue but I just expected 2.8Ghz dual to be faster and to be honest after sleeping over it I think it is pretty quick I guess i shouldn't complain about a startup time of 8.5 seconds on photoshop cs4 should i? something which my old laptop would take at least a minute at/???

And for battery life and CPU temperature in Windows, note that Windows isn't power efficient at all, not by a long shot.

Even someone whom I know who's got a hackintosh (taboo I know, but important for this point) on a windows laptop finds much better battery life on that Vaio booting OS X than Windows.

Hmm yes indeed gaming got me 45 min battery life in windows? worrying isn't it. still once i get a second battery all my problems will be over lol

This one, I think the problem is you but I think you know that. How hard is it to "eject" a device before unplugging it? Takes a quick moment and might save damage to your device.

Have a look around preferences in Mail, there should be an option to delete the files from your server when they've been downloaded to your computer. I think its "removed unedited downloads:" and you can choose never/after mail quits/after message is deleted." Thats the closest I could find to it, it used to be "leave downloaded messages on server" in the past or on other programs.
Under "mailbox" in the menu bar you can choose to "erase deleted mail" --> "in all accounts" or choose a specific account and that will permanently get rid of anything that's deleted in the Mail program.

Longer battery life would be hella nice. No way have i been able to get the time they promote.

To be honest it is not a matter of how hard is it to eject but rather it is just a habit from windows... I guess I should be a bit more carefull might stop my file server from dying so often
As for Mail thanks a lot solved my problem very very very helpfull i did look through the preferences but did not get there the first time but found it now.


One last thing though I did the trackpad update yesterday after a fresh restart and OSX crashed god knows what was wrong there???




I just want to make clear though that this topic was not me ranting about the macbook pro. I am not an idiot and would not have bought one if i had not known that it would be suitable for what I want it to do.
In general I am very happy and i thought if I wrote my prolems i have had with it other people may find this thread and find it usefull... as well of course as fixing all the little niggles I have found.
Thanks for all the answers so far