10 things I don't like about my Mac

OK, calm down, I love my Mac. But I'm not blind with love: there are things I do not like.

Wake up, dammit!

Sometimes I put my MacBook Pro to sleep and then realize, ooops, no, I forgot something. Tap the ENTER key, it ignores me. I have to go pour a glass of water before it's ready to wake up. Fixed! See the comments.

Broken Key

Speaking of hitting that RETURN key, this is the second Mac I've owned where that key breaks. It's either too thin (did you save 100th of a cent on that, Apple?) or doesn't have enough support. Mine is held together with clear tape right now.. kind of chintzy on a $2,200.00 box, I think.

I want more RAM

What, a 3GB hard wired limit? Who made this decision? Nowadays we use RAM like peanuts - 4GB is the minimum that should be possible, and 16GB is more like it!

I could use some more disk space too..

Why can't I virtualize OS X?

If I had OS X Server I could, so why can't I do it with MY OS X?

I see the lights, I see the city lights

But I don't see the backlit keyboard lights because Preferences keeps unchecking that. I had to go get http://labtick.proculo.de/ to get control of these lights.

Silly Reboots

A few days ago I had to reboot for a QuickTime patch. QuickTime? I need to restart the whole computer because of QuickTime? Doesn't seem right to me, but we get a lot of this kind of thing.

Scary Reboots - Talk to Me!

Whoah, that 10.5.2 update sure took a while, didn't it? And gives darn little feedback about what it's doing. Guys: if the screen doesn't change every two seconds at least, I get worried. Better too much chatter than too little when it comes to patches.

Spotlight

No, really, I love Spotlight, especially on Leopard. But I want more control over what it indexes - I don't like having to name something with a ".txt" extension to get Spotlight to see it. If I want my "H" file indexed, I should be able to have that.

And that goes for you, too, Quicklook!

I wrote a little shell script to make Quicklook behave better, but it would be nice if I could just tell it what to do, wouldn't it?

And then finally..

Nothing. I couldn't think of ten things. That's good, really: mostly it's "What's not to like?" in the Mac world. But that's just my list - other people dislike other things, and we all know that no OS can be all things to all people.

It's pretty darn close though..

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Wed Feb 13 03:48:31 2008: Subject:   BruceGarlock
http://garlockfamily.com

What happens if you press the escape key a few times - that usually nudges my MBP out of it's slumber..



Wed Feb 13 10:49:43 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Nope, no difference..





Fri Feb 22 18:47:09 2008: Subject:   Bruce


How about this:

< http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319>

Or zapping the PRAM?

How about turning up the display brightness? I have one machine that did that once, and it somehow had the screen brightness dimmed all the way down, and it looked like it was not waking from sleep.

I would say the SMC reset should help. It usually fixed any of my wake from sleep issues, but you probably have already tried that...

- Bruce





Fri Feb 22 19:57:03 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


No, it wakes from sleep fine.

So are you saying that if you put yours to sleep you can immediately tap a key to wake it up??

I have to wait for the disk to spin down..



Sat Feb 23 12:36:10 2008: Subject: Sleep   kernspaltung


I noticed that my new MacBook took about 20-30 seconds to go to sleep (as indicated by the snoozing LED), versus near-instantaneous sleep for my beloved 12" PowerBook G4. It turns out that Apple is using hibernate mode 3 (suspend to disk) by default now instead of mode 0 (suspend to RAM), so it takes about that long to write 2GB worth of system state to disk and sleep. During that time, it's not going to respond to any inputs because it's not really sleeping yet. If you don't do any hot-swapping of batteries, you can change to sleep mode 0 by entering the following command in a Terminal session:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Your MacBook Pro should sleep immediately, and can be awoken immediately too. To revert back to the default, simply change the 0 to a 3 in the command above.

Hope that helps!



Sat Feb 23 13:08:30 2008: Subject:   BruceGarlock


Ah, maybe because I have unchecked my "put HD to sleep when possible", is why mine wakes up immediately. I had also did the above option to change from hibernate, to sleep using the command: 'sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0' so, that probably explains why mine wakes up immediately.

I uncheck the "put HD to sleep when possible" on all my Macs. Probably because sometimes I could not wake them up, or it just took too damn long :-) When I setup a new Mac for someone, it is one of the first things I do, without even realizing it now.. I guess that probably explains things :-)

Take care,

Bruce



Sat Feb 23 17:44:07 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Yes the pmset -a hibernatemode 0 does it - thanks.

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