Greetings,
New here, hello. I've owned and upgraded 2 of the new MBPs in the last few days, learned a few things, and thought I'd pass along a couple of observations. Perhaps a bit of this may be useful to someone else here.
I've been in need of a new laptop, had macs long ago, and decided to pickup the new MBP. My local Best Buy had the low end i5 15" model which I bought last Wednesday. Fantastic laptop, but everyone here knows that already, forgive me for being a bit late to the party.
I decided to upgrade the hard drive, and purchased a 500 GB Seagate 7200 rpm. Installed this, and found the vibration from the high rpm drive to be very annoying through the aluminum chassis. So, returned the 7200 Seagate for a 5400 WD 620 GB drive. Easy swap, no vibration in this drive.
Lesson 1: the 7200 rpm drive I installed was noisy and vibrated compared to the 2 5400 rpm drives I tried.
I partionned the new drive to install Windows, and dropped in a fresh copy of W7 with bootcamp, another easy install. Yeah! Best of both worlds. FYI, the 2.4 GHz i5 MBP scored the following Windows Experience Index ratings (with the 640 GB Western Digital drive):
Processor: 6.7
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 6.4
Graphics 3D/Gaming: 6.4
Primary HD: 5.9
On Friday night, I made the mistake of stopping by the local Apple store. Saw the 15" i7 with hi-res 1680x1050, anti-glare display. On paper, the specs didn't seem that different than the normal 1440x900. In person, simply night and day. Just no comparison. And the matte finish was huge. To top it off, I qualify for the education discount (on a one-year university appointment) which Apple gave me right in the store. So, as George Thorogood would say, Out the door I went. New i7, hi-res display, much-drained bank account....
It had taken me about 8 hours to setup the prior MBP with the dual partition, transfer of my files, etc. Figured I'd have to repeat this with the new MBP. I put the original 320 GB drive back in the first MBP, and installed the 640 GB drive in the new hi-res model. Viola! It worked right off the bat! Both the OS X partition recognized the new hardware, and the Windows 7 partition rebooted once after it recognized the new hardware as well! I was under the impression (having used Time Machine in my original disc swap) that the drive was tied to a particular machine.
Lesson 2: upgrade/swap of the new MBP was a breeze. Just installed the new hard drive, and was good to go. 10 minute upgrade.
Lesson 3: no comparison for me hi-res anti-glare to regular glossy. Highly recommend the anti-glare the whole way.
In use, I found the i7 perhaps marginally faster than the i5, really hard to tell. In particular, applications seemed to open a "bounce" or 2 faster than the i5. FYI, I reran Windows Experience Index on the new i7 2.66 GHz processor. All results were identical, except the processor score. It was
Processor: 6.9
Just loving the MBP. The old one goes back to Best Buy today. I will probably have to swallow the restocking fee, but the educator discount I got on the new MBP more than covers this.
Thanks for reading. Excuse the long first post.
Joe M.
New here, hello. I've owned and upgraded 2 of the new MBPs in the last few days, learned a few things, and thought I'd pass along a couple of observations. Perhaps a bit of this may be useful to someone else here.
I've been in need of a new laptop, had macs long ago, and decided to pickup the new MBP. My local Best Buy had the low end i5 15" model which I bought last Wednesday. Fantastic laptop, but everyone here knows that already, forgive me for being a bit late to the party.
I decided to upgrade the hard drive, and purchased a 500 GB Seagate 7200 rpm. Installed this, and found the vibration from the high rpm drive to be very annoying through the aluminum chassis. So, returned the 7200 Seagate for a 5400 WD 620 GB drive. Easy swap, no vibration in this drive.
Lesson 1: the 7200 rpm drive I installed was noisy and vibrated compared to the 2 5400 rpm drives I tried.
I partionned the new drive to install Windows, and dropped in a fresh copy of W7 with bootcamp, another easy install. Yeah! Best of both worlds. FYI, the 2.4 GHz i5 MBP scored the following Windows Experience Index ratings (with the 640 GB Western Digital drive):
Processor: 6.7
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 6.4
Graphics 3D/Gaming: 6.4
Primary HD: 5.9
On Friday night, I made the mistake of stopping by the local Apple store. Saw the 15" i7 with hi-res 1680x1050, anti-glare display. On paper, the specs didn't seem that different than the normal 1440x900. In person, simply night and day. Just no comparison. And the matte finish was huge. To top it off, I qualify for the education discount (on a one-year university appointment) which Apple gave me right in the store. So, as George Thorogood would say, Out the door I went. New i7, hi-res display, much-drained bank account....
It had taken me about 8 hours to setup the prior MBP with the dual partition, transfer of my files, etc. Figured I'd have to repeat this with the new MBP. I put the original 320 GB drive back in the first MBP, and installed the 640 GB drive in the new hi-res model. Viola! It worked right off the bat! Both the OS X partition recognized the new hardware, and the Windows 7 partition rebooted once after it recognized the new hardware as well! I was under the impression (having used Time Machine in my original disc swap) that the drive was tied to a particular machine.
Lesson 2: upgrade/swap of the new MBP was a breeze. Just installed the new hard drive, and was good to go. 10 minute upgrade.
Lesson 3: no comparison for me hi-res anti-glare to regular glossy. Highly recommend the anti-glare the whole way.
In use, I found the i7 perhaps marginally faster than the i5, really hard to tell. In particular, applications seemed to open a "bounce" or 2 faster than the i5. FYI, I reran Windows Experience Index on the new i7 2.66 GHz processor. All results were identical, except the processor score. It was
Processor: 6.9
Just loving the MBP. The old one goes back to Best Buy today. I will probably have to swallow the restocking fee, but the educator discount I got on the new MBP more than covers this.
Thanks for reading. Excuse the long first post.
Joe M.
