I haven't written much about my Macbook Pro as yet, however after a few months of fairly heavy use I'm finding it a very nice piece of kit for running both OSX and Windows. There are quite a few people in the land of .NET who have switched to Macbook (*.*)'s and written about it, so I'll skip that, but there are a few things I did want to write about quickly.
When I first got my Mac I noticed that what OSX and Windows refer to as hibernation is slightly different. The default in OSX is to suspend the OS to RAM, while with Windows it suspends to the hard drive. It's obviously a personal preference thing, and it depends on how you like to work, but I prefer to suspend to disk – something about having that power light flash, no matter how subtle, which I just don't like. Fortunately there are other people out there who feel the same way, and apparently there are a lot of rather grandiose applications available to help you manage this.. or if you're like me and you prefer to keep it simple, check out this post. The summary is that if you just want to switch to suspend to disk then you can run up a terminal window and run "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5". Done. If you ever want to switch back to the OSX default behavior, then just issue "sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0". Read more if you want to know more about the modes and setting up bash aliases etc, but those 2 commands were enough for me. Actually, one was enough to be precise.
I'm still not quite sure whether I'll settle on using Windows via Fusion or Bootcamp for Visual Studio use – I've got both setup at the moment and am finding it hard to decide whether the improved performance of running Vista via Bootcamp is more valuable to me than the convenience of running Windows 2003 server inside Fusion. I suspect I really need to give Vista inside Fusion a try, and I'd try this with my Bootcamp partition if it wasn't for the "You may be a victim of forgery" popups get thrown up when loading my Bootcamp partition via Fusion due to the differing hardware signatures. More investigation required on my part – I suppose I should also give Vista inside a VM a try as well, although there's only so many times you can install Windows per month before you need to draw a line and get some actual work done and I will, now that I took the leap of faith and activated Vista a second time via Fusion.
Sticking on the Bootcamp theme, I recently wanted to slightly expand my Bootcamp partition. I first created it as a test more than anything else, but loved the speed of Vista on the Macbook too much to delete it. However after a bit of regular use it seems I need just a tiny bit more space. A bit of research revealed that resizing it was going to be as much of a pain as I feared, so I went the low tech route – for now I've simply disabled the hibernation in Vista to reclaim 3gb and reduced the max size of the pagefile. The gain of 5gb should be enough to let me put off the joy of imaging my Bootcamp partition, deleting it, and restoring it for a few months at least. It's a shame to lose hibernation though – it's quite neat using dual boot and restoring Vista from hibernation instead of booting up – and so far it's seemed pretty reliable too.
Finally, I'm a bit surprised at the fact that there's no alternative to Entourage if you're after an OSX client for Exchange. I need RPC over HTTP, so POP/IMAP won't cut it. For now I'm just going to install Outlook inside one of my Windows options for when I'm on the move, and wait for Snow Lepoard, which is apparently going to add support for Exchange servers inside OSX's native Mail application.
Just gave Mail in my current version of OSX (10.5.5 – is that Snow Leopard? Me Windows Guy no understand shiny mac) a go. Connected to Exchange, no dramas at all. Yet again the Mac experience delivers!