Deliciously Stephy

MacBook can be colourful and … slow and hot!

June 22nd, 2006

A while ago, Chap told me about a site that offers colouring service to MacBook Pro. You can have your Mac’s exterior customized to a colour of your choice.

Recently they expanded this service to the new MacBook. Well, that’s predictable; but as a MacBook owner, of course I have to blog it and ramble a bit on this whole colouring thing.

The above colours would be my choices if I were to spend US$500 to colour my MacBook.

Yes, US$500! How many people would pay $500 to change the colour of their Mac’s? Isn’t it a bit too much? If I had $500, I would have bought more RAM for my MacBook coz 512MB RAM is so not enough.

You know how slow my MacBook can get? What about its taking 30 seconds to respond? That’s exactly what happened when I was only running two programs (small background jobs where each takes less than 2MB RAM are not counted.)

Well, I know Firefox has a serious memory leak problem. Actually, it is always the biggest memory consumer on my Mac. It accounts for about 100 to 200 MB of real memory usage, which is about one-fifth of what I have on my Mac.

Nevertheless, it is a new computer …… a new Mac running on Intel’s dual core chip. Naturally I expected it to drastically outperform my ready-to-die Pentium III. How could it be even worse than my Pentium III? Impossible eh?

That’s why I can’t help complaining when my MacBook crawls.

Someone linked this problem to the 67 degrees Celcius threshold, at which MacBook will start making a “moo” sound and applications freeze frequently.

I’m not sure if applications would start freezing frequently once the threshold is reached, but my MacBook does “moo” occasionally. Nevertheless, this doesn’t happen so often that I would be annoyed by it.

Someone complained about it at an Apple Store, but Apple said this was normal. A lot of speculations have been made as to why the fan “acts up” like this. Some said it was a poor design. Some said it was a manufacturing problem.

If you’re curious about how this “moo” sound is like, click here; but this is not exactly what I heard from my MacBook. My MacBook doesn’t “moo” so loud.

Anyway, I can minimize the number of programs running on my Mac; say… I only have my Firefox and Finder running. Then everything would be fine. It’s not too much of a trouble for me, but of course… getting more RAM for my Mac would be better… but then it also means that I have to give up 512MB RAM.

Why? The 512MB RAM that comes with the system is actually two 256MB RAM on two slots. Rumor says, MacBook was designed to be running on two identical RAM; it will allocate resources better and hence perform better this way.

So what does it mean? There’s noooooo way that I can make use of the two 256MB RAM that comes with the system if I want to add more RAM to my computer.

If you asked me what I dun like about this new MacBook, I would say …… not enough RAM and the fact that it needs two identical RAM to achieve its best performance (yet I’m only given two 256MB RAM).

Would it be wiser to upgrade my MacBook at the very beginning (when I bought it)? I dunno ……

Chap’s friend upgraded his MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. He got 1GB RAM for $130 (After Tax). Get the same upgrade from Apple? It will cost you $200(Plus Tax).

Well, prices of all computer parts are constantly dropping as newer and more advance versions keep flooding the market. I definitely can survive with 512MB RAM.

One last problem that I want to bring up here: the heat problem.

Well, this doesn’t really bother me; but I guess I’m a perfectionist and this makes me feel that this MacBook is not so perfect as advertised. It seems that there are still problems needed to be taken care of, but you know how business works — it’s not about making a perfect product. It’s about making money.

I guess it won’t take them long to solve this heat problem (and that “moo” sound). Then there comes a new version of MacBook …… Hope it won’t be so soon. (I’m a selfish!)

Entry Filed under: Apple Products