Well, I no longer have a Macbook. At least temporarily. Thursday morning I discovered that my battery would not hold charge, actually the machine failed to detect the presence of a battery at all. I followed all the procedures outlined by the Apple support website, but still no luck. So yesterday I dropped the machine in to the nearest Apple centre.

Naturally, none of the techs work weekends so nobody will even look at the machine until tomorrow. I’m also having the top case changed to get rid of the grubby yellow marks, that will probably take about a week. I haven’t read much recently about the discoloration issue, but to my knowledge it has been resolved – so I have a brand new battery and shiny white top case to look forward to when I get the unit back.

One of my friends just bought his second Macbook this weekend, after having sold his original Black model. I couldn’t see any major difference between the Core 2 2.0GHz and my 1.83GHz Core 1. I expect once Leopard arrives and with it, applications that can use EM64T – we will start to see a bit of a performance difference.

At the Apple store, I had a bit of time to play with the Macbook Pro that was on demo, it’s really hard to decide whether to keep my Macbook or not. If I sell it, I can put the money back towards saving up for a new MBP. Although it would mean going without a notebook for at least a few months. I’m not sure which I’d miss more, having a notebook, or just having something that doesn’t use Windows.

I can’t sleep tonight, not sure why. I didn’t purposely sleep in too late as I knew I had work tomorrow (today). An Xbox 360 torrent I was downloading finally finished, and it actually worked. Shame the dual layer DVD+R discs are so expensive, it would also be nice if there was an easier way to flash the optical drive firmware to play burned discs. It was Rainbow Six Vegas, which looks stunning in 720p – my only gripe was the lack of physics and feet. What is it with all these flashy games overlooking such a simple thing as feet.

It’s not my 360, otherwise I’d probably be up playing right now. I thought about getting one a little while ago but decided it was still too expensive and I probably wouldn’t get enough use out of it. So I upgraded one of the hard disks in our server today, swapping out a 200GB for a 400GB IDE. Although with all the new stuff coming out recently I can’t see that free space pie graph staying purple for long. I think purple is the free space anyway, I’d check it but I’m on OSX. Speaking of which, another build of Leopard leaked a few days ago, I’m yet to see any new screenshots or lists of added features but I doubt we’ll see anything major until launch.

A friend of mine was keen to go to the Windows Vista launch tonight, why anyone would bother is still beyond me. I keep seeing all these stories on Digg about how hard Microsoft is pushing this launch, although I’m yet to see any evidence of that here yet. Naturally DELL is offering free upgrades and the usual marketing crap, but it’s not like I’ve seen television or print ads from Microsoft. I believe tomorrow will be the first day we’ll (work) be legally able to sell copies of Vista – I wonder if we’ll get any punters.

Microsoft seems to have made sure to look after the multi-nationals first, offering them all the stock and exclusitivity of the “Upgrade” versions, last time I looked we still could not purchase them wholesale – only the OEM full versions. Which I believe can only be installed fresh, not upgraded to. Anyway, I’m going to try and catch some sleep again – make sure to check out Steve Jobs’ prank call to Starbucks (check the Tech column on the right hand side).

Not sure why I’m updating the site, I should be updating this version of WordPress if anything. Supposedly, the new version includes a lot of AJAX backend fixes and updates. Anyway. At work, we are receiving half a dozen copies of Windows Vista (yes, legitamate copies) – however we are under strict orders not to sell them until the 30th of January, for obvious reasons. I read on ZDNet the other day that several of Sydney’s Harvey Norman stores are doing midnight stores, apparently so is our local store – I can’t imagine why anyone would want to wait up all hours of the night at a computer retailer to get their hands on the latest Microsoft operating system.

We’re only receiving Home Premium, we’ll probably order in Vista Business next week. There’s no point bothering with Home Basic, even the major OEMs have admitted that it is basically useless, and is targeted more towards an upgrade for older systems, or a cheaper option for very very elementary systems. Our buy price is around $190 inc GST, and $270 for Vista Ultimate. I think I will continue to run my funny copy on our Home Theatre PC here.

I think I mentioned in my previous post I was planning to butcher our leechbox. It’s a dual processor Pentium II Xeon 450MHz, with 512MB of RAM running Debian. Due to recent hard drive re-arrangements in our main file server, I had a few extra drives laying around.

I thought I’d start off by changing the NIC, as we now have a Gigabit switch I pulled one of the controllers out of my server (it had three), but then Linux didn’t want to boot – I figured it’d be easier to just re-install anyway seeing as the original boot drive was about to become part of a RAID array. So, new Intel PRO/1000MT adaptor, one 20GB to boot (pun intended), and two 40s to be put in to RAID 0. Sif I’m going to sacrifice half my disk space 😛

I chose to go the manual route this time, using the Debian net install disc and only installing the base system. Samba was the only hiccup of note, and Apache’s stupid alias to /usr/share/images (thanks Insidius). Software wise everything is working fine, but the hard disks are getting damn hot – and I can’t install any more fans to the case. I think I have no choice but to actually rebuild all the components in to a new (cooler) case, might want to think about upgrading that 250W power supply while I’m at it 😐 TBC.

So Windows Vista launches in less than a fortnight. I’ve been playing with it both at work and at home for the past few weeks, since the BillGates leak in December. It’s certainly a step up from XP in many regards, although for my own personal use on my gamer/server I think I’ll be sticking with XP SP1. I am running Vista on my HTPC though, as I find the Media Centre about a hundred times better than the XP version. Most of the widely known bugs (channel shifting, guide problems) have been corrected, so despite it running like shit I’m sticking with it.

Initially the HTPC had 512MB of RAM, I figured this would be enough for Vista considering all it is doing is playing back videos and streaming live televsion. Wrong. I’ve had to upgrade to 1GB, I suppose the performance is comparable to XP on 128MB versus 256MB – in other words, there is no competition.

Didn’t do much over the new year period, planned to have a bit of a party for New Year’s Eve, and received only one guest out of about a dozen invited. Since then, straight back to work, no holidays for me this year. Financially I came out not too bad, so I’m considering purchasing a new TV, currently looking at the SONY BRAVIA range, as I can get them at wholesale from a supplier through work. The only real question is the choice between rear projection and LCD TV. Both do similar resolutions and picture quality is mostly the same, however the phyiscal size of the units differs quite a bit.

Beyond that, over the last few days I have been making small upgrades all over the house. Our primary network switch is now Gigabit, however we’re still stuck using our backup ADSL modem (see previous post). Also, our fileserver has had its’ storage moderately upgraded, with an extra 250GB odd space to fill. I’m about to try installing a few old drives I have laying around (20GB, 40GB) in to our Linux server which handles all the BitTorrent downloads, I hope I can still remember how to set up a RAID 0 array and fix up /etc/fstab accordingly.