Mac Book Pro Woes
Feb 18th, 2008 by Karen
Last August work acquire a MacBook Pro for me. I wanted it so I could run Parallels and do effective cross browser testing as well as using MarcEdit to test Z39.50 configurations. I don’t know if it is computer karma or what but is it has never quite been right since I got it. I brushed this off initially as the fact that I like to run a minimum of two virtual machines as well as all my normal stuff, which is typically several Terminal windows, Remote Desktop, email, and Dreamweaver. So that would slow it down, right?! But over the months it has become flakier and flakier and I can’t login to it at all unless I’m on the network at work (even with a local account).
I wanted to take it to code4lib and use Parallels, which I cannot do on my personal and ever faithful Powerbook. So today I decided enough was enough and wiped it and attempted put a clean install of Leopard on it. The short story is that things have gone from bad to worse (ie. it won’t boot properly at all). So I’m going have to call in the local Mac experts to see if they can put things right. So, it looks like I’ll be bringing my Powerbook to code4lib after all, sigh. On the bright side, my data is all safely backed up and (fingers crossed) once I’m done with this ordeal things should work the way I want them to.
FYI — after you get your computer back into the land of the living I suggest using VMWare Fusion as your virtual machine. I selected this after reading a number of horror stories w/ Parallels and have had excellent success with it. I suspect that Parallels has worked the bugs out by now, but I don’t plan to mess with success. I usually have a number of programs running on the Mac side and Photoshop CS3 on the Windows side.
One caution … make sure you have enough memory in the Powerbook. I recommend 2 GB minimum so that you can allocate 1 GB to the virtual machine. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Good luck!