Macbook

OS X Lion: My first impressions

- 2 minute read.

I have had the option to run dev copies of OS X Lion for sometime now, but decided to wait till it hit the App Store.  So needless to say I bought it as soon as I could and have been toying with it ever since.
When I first installed it I was noticing a lot of issues with thing just not working as well as they used to, this led me to doing a fresh install of Lion just to make sure all of my old settings had been cleared out from previous installs.  By reinstalling I was also able to clean up my laptop quite a bit and regained over 100gb of space by moving items to offsite locations.

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Hitachi Travelstar 500GB 7200RPM Upgrade

- 1 minute read.

After getting the new Macbook Pro 13in, I quickly used up the 250gb of space that was on it.  I then knew it was either I delete some files, or get a new hard drive.  I opted to get a larger faster drive as I really hate deleting files.  The install was a little more complicated then my previous Macbook…. Mainly just a few more screws to get the drive out.  After the drive was replaced I booted off the OS X CD.  I placed the old drive in an external case, towards the end of the install it allowed me to recover from another hard drive.  I pointed the install to the external drive and it took about 2hrs but it restored all of my files.
I ran xBench before and after to see if there was any improvement going from a 5400RPM drive to a 7200RPM drive. Here are the results.
5400 RPM Drive



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Switching to Chrome

- 1 minute read.
Google Chrome Logo

I have been a longtime fan/user of Mozilla Firefox, though over the last couple of years it has become more and more of a memory hog.  I have tried to use Safari and tried Google Chrome a while back but they never had the plugin support I was looking for.
The other day with the purchase of a new MacBook Pro for my birthday I decided to give Google Chrome another try.  I was glad to see that it has come a long way on the extension front that it once lacked.  I was impressed enough with the available extensions that I even switched my work computer over to Chrome.  I am hoping that I can stick with it and banish Firefox from all of my machines, I will try to revisit this post and give further pros and cons in the coming week.