Originally Posted by Gerco

Well. I have spent the weekend working with the new Macbook pro 17 I bought on Friday. Here are my thoughts so far....

1. Very simple to setup, The biggest issue I have had so far is seting up my wireless interent. For some reason the airport does not like WEP enabled on my neatgear. Just need to find the fix I'm sure. But without WEP it works fine.

2. I do photography.. So I figured I might as well get Apature and see if I like it, words still out on that for me.

3. Photoshop c2s, Bibble, dreamweaver 8 etc... all work great. FACT I belive this laptop is actually faster than my twin athlon desktop system. Going to do some encoding test to find out.

4. I get about 1 email every 4 days from a MAC user that can't play the WMV from my site. So I took this as a chnace to figure out the issue myself. Had it solved in about 10 minutes. Found a FREE utility that allows WMV to be played in quicktime, works flawless, still in beta though, will offer link to it on my site for other mac users.

5. HATE the fucking one button mouse. Had to plug in an external mouse... now I have my right clicking back and am a happy camper, I like the external mouse better anyways, more control.

6. Widgets... interesting, have actually found a few that I actually use. Nice idea.

7. built in software... seems nice so far. I'm running iDVD for the first time right now, doing a "magic DVD" I pluged in my vx2000 via firewire, started this program, it asked my to put a blank DVD in, then rewound the TAPe, started the capture and is creating the DVD from the tape... ALL by itself. No driver issues, no fucking around with equipment... it just worked the first time... That to me is impressive. Also a great way to be able to give copys of contnet to others dureing shoots, as I can copy a dvd in about 11 minutes using another program I own.

8. Operating system... yes mac does crash.. at least I have gotten a few programs to hang. I'm pushing it pretty hard, still a lot more stable than XP so far.

9. Networking. worked flawless, saw my network automatically, allowed me to connect to my XP machines, been moving files around with no problem. Very simple.

10. web surfing... well I have to admit the first thing I did was download firefox for mac.. Like it a lot better than the built in "safari" But I'm use to it. Looks and works the same as my XP version.

All in all, I'm very happy with this laptop. But, for almost 4k I better be... LOL. I would not be afraid to suggest the switch to anyone. At first I thought I was going to try Boot Camp to allow me to dual boot to XP but, I have been able to find every program I use native osx, with the exception of Nikon Capture, which I'm sure is coming out soon, since they already have versions from the non Intel CPU Macs. But the only reason I need and use capture is to remote control my D2x using the wt-a2 wireless device... so no big hurry anyways. On that note, the wireless unit for the d2x found and worked with the laptops FTP the first time, total time to set it up, less than 5 minutes... NICE! fucked with XP for hours to finally get it working, but than, only after configuring it to run though an external router... pain in the ass.

Ok thats my report to date!