• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

Reply to: MacBook Air FTW!

Collapse

You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

  • You are not logged in. If you are already registered, fill in the form below to log in, or follow the "Sign Up" link to register a new account.
  • You may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
  • If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

Previously on "MacBook Air FTW!"

Collapse

  • Fishface
    replied
    Hackintosh?

    you ever done it ?

    I have an oldish Thinkpad I was gonna have a go on.

    Leave a comment:


  • NickFitz
    replied
    Originally posted by chef View Post
    What spec?
    The biggest, but I didn't bother with the slightly faster processor - from various articles I've read, that's only really of value if you do a lot of video encoding and such, which I don't. The real speedup comes from the SSD, at least as far as the majority of develeopment-related work goes; and of course any old machine is capable of running trivial stuff like word processing and spreadsheets more than adequately these days.

    Originally posted by doodab View Post
    I do keep meaning to try netbeans though.
    I've been using Netbeans at ClientCo, but finally became disillusioned last week when I discovered that, if it's running on Windows, there's absolutely no way to get it to save a file with Unix line endings unless that file was originally created with them: any files it creates get the platform-it's-running-on's line endings, and can't be changed. (Similarly, if you use it to edit a file created elsewhere with Unix line endings, it can't be saved with DOS line endings even though you are running on Windows.) This was very annoying when I was trying to knock up a quick shell script for the STB, which runs a very barebones version of Linux. In the end I had to use dos2unix from a Cygwin shell

    Leave a comment:


  • doodab
    replied
    Originally posted by Churchill View Post
    What's the problem with Eclipse? It runs wonderfully on my 64 bit Win 7, 6 core Bulldozer setup
    Fine on my dual core laptop as well. Of course I do have 8gb RAM and an SSD, and I increased the starting heap size and switched off a chunk of autocompletes and autovalidations and disabled a few plugins i don't use.

    I do keep meaning to try netbeans though.

    Leave a comment:


  • Churchill
    replied
    What's the problem with Eclipse? It runs wonderfully on my 64 bit Win 7, 6 core Bulldozer setup

    Leave a comment:


  • eek
    replied
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Excellent machine - even Eclipse feels responsive on it
    Thats a first.

    Its the SSD that makes the difference really. With the Dell I picked up last week (Latitude E6520 top of range but not SSD £470 inc) adding the SSD moved it from being very good to blimey that's fast.

    Leave a comment:


  • chef
    replied
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Brand new, bought yesterday. Excellent machine - even Eclipse feels responsive on it
    What spec?

    Leave a comment:


  • NickFitz
    replied
    Originally posted by d000hg View Post
    Is that brand new or a slightly older spec? They are gorgeous but I've no reason to spend so much for so little (literally )
    Brand new, bought yesterday. Excellent machine - even Eclipse feels responsive on it

    Leave a comment:


  • d000hg
    replied
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Just got around to installing Parallels and booted a Windows XP SP3 VM.

    Less than 10 seconds from initiating boot to "There are unused icons on your desktop"!
    Is that brand new or a slightly older spec? They are gorgeous but I've no reason to spend so much for so little (literally )

    Leave a comment:


  • scooterscot
    replied
    Originally posted by doodab View Post
    Switching on my win7 laptop from sleep takes less than a second.
    Well if you do keep your finger on the button it's to be expected.

    Leave a comment:


  • doodab
    replied
    Switching on my win7 laptop from sleep takes less than a second.

    Win 2008 Server, Solaris, Linux VMs all resume in seconds. It's basically proportional to the size of the VM RAM and the transfer rate of your disk. I'm limited to about 250MB/s by SATA II at the moment. That's the trouble with 3-5 year old hardware.

    I was rather impressed with my oracle DB on Win 2008 VM the other day, I was getting better throughput than the clients 8 way sun box connected to their SAN. I was surprised because I though they all had flash accelerators in these days. Gotta love SSDs.

    I'll be interested to see how it goes when I get my new machine with 32GB, SATA 6Gbps and an up to date CPU.

    Leave a comment:


  • NickFitz
    replied
    Originally posted by Troll View Post
    So if it's so great why are you installing a Windows VM ?

    Serious question as everyone I know with one does the same...
    The names of the VMs are a clue: "XP IE6", "XP IE7", "XP IE8"...

    I also have some Linux VMs but they're also just for browser testing and playing with stuff.

    Leave a comment:


  • administrator
    replied
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Just got around to installing Parallels and booted a Windows XP SP3 VM.

    Less than 10 seconds from initiating boot to "There are unused icons on your desktop"!
    I get that on my Windows machine with SSDs now, super quick! My home-office machine, still on old SATA drives can take 5 mins from restart to being fully loaded. Just looking at getting new MOBO and drives here as well now

    Leave a comment:


  • Troll
    replied
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Just got around to installing Parallels and booted a Windows XP SP3 VM.

    Less than 10 seconds from initiating boot to "There are unused icons on your desktop"!
    So if it's so great why are you installing a Windows VM ?

    Serious question as everyone I know with one does the same...

    Leave a comment:


  • scooterscot
    replied
    Install XP with SP 3 a couple of nights ago on a headless mac mini using parallels.

    Screen shared through my iMac. Works a treat whilst hardly consuming iMac resources.

    Speaking of XP, why is every client site I walked onto still using XP? Should they not be on Windows 13 by now?

    (We all know how it went for Now that's what I can Music 1. Remember buying the first on cassette!)
    Last edited by scooterscot; 5 February 2012, 10:14.

    Leave a comment:


  • NickFitz
    started a topic MacBook Air FTW!

    MacBook Air FTW!

    Just got around to installing Parallels and booted a Windows XP SP3 VM.

    Less than 10 seconds from initiating boot to "There are unused icons on your desktop"!

Working...
X