Apple’s Back-to-School Offer is now on! Buy a Mac with your education discount and an iPod touch could be yours. This offer is for current and incoming University, Polytechnic, Junior College or Institute of Technical Education in Singapore as well as faculty and staff for all education levels. And, parents buying for their University, Polytechnic, Junior College or ITE bound kids can take advantage of it, too.

For students, teachers, and parents alike, now is a great time to take advantage of their education discount.

This special offer is available for a limited time: now through September 7.

To make it clear, you will have to purchase the Mac and the iPod touch then submit a rebate request where the cost of the iPod touch will be reimbursed. Simple as that.

All information can be found at Apple’s website.

Some Basic Spec:

Fitted with a 2.0 GHz Intel Menlow platform with up to 2GB memory and 128GB SSD, the LG X300 runs Windows 7 Home Premium OS and ships with a spare 2-cell battery to provide up to seven hours of use.

It is so slim and I want one. Hope to get one review set soon. Engadget has a review on this slim beauty.

The units are expected to be shipped soon internationally, especially the Wi-Fi model. Yes there are two models, the other with 3G modem built in.

Price: US$499 and US$829 for the Wi-Fi and 3G model respectively.

Brief Specification:

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  9.7 inch IPS LED back-lit screen

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  1GHz Apple A4 processor

• Battery Lasts up to 10hr
  16GB, 32GB & 64GB capacities

  Weight: is about 0.68Kg

See the rest of the specifications here.

I cant say anything about it till I can get my hands on one. Will I  be purchasing it? NO. I happy with my relatively new Macbook Pro and don’t need another Apple product lest be called Apple geek.

For some reason, you might need Windows to be running on your shiny Mac. It might be some Windows specific application or for our development project or whatever. Here I am not talking about dual booting using Boot Camp but running Windows within Mac.

If you had been looking for a Virtual Machine you might have come across Parallels which you have to pay. I recommend a free application which does the same thing. It is Virtualbox.

From Wikipedia:

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine.

1. Design

2. Speed

3. Battery Life

4. Track pad

5. The Dock

7. Finder and Cover flow

8. Time Machine

Absolutely useful and fool proof method of backing up you system and data. Plug-in you external hard drive and make it time machine compatible. After that your Mac will be regularly backed up.

If you happen to reinstall the OS all your data and applications can be restored from the time machine disk. Cool huh!

Enter the time machine to restore files.

9. Parental Control

You could probably live without it. Basically you can control what a particular user can do on your machine. Even has timer function where it only allows a use to login during a particular time. Useful if you have kids and you want to limit the time they use on the PC. Go and Study Kids!

10. iLife application

iLife applications really saves your life. No frustrations using them. It is so easy to use and powerful. I finished editing 3 DVD worth of movie clips in 6 days. I have waiting to edit the movies when I was using the PC. Moreover absolutely free and comes with the Mac.

- iPhoto to manage your photos
- iMovie to edit movies
- Garageband to make your music. If you are a musician an excellent peice of software. Too bad I am not.
- iWeb to create simple websites.

Concluding

Its money well spent for me. It is portable and powerful enough for my use. Battery life is absolutely a boon as I can use it for long periods without much worry.
Try a mac and you will know what I mean.

Let me list down here 10 reasons why I love Windows 7:

1. Improved Performance

Boot up time might be debatable as from what I notice it could be same or slower than Windows Vista or Windows XP. On my machine Boot up and Shutdown is fast. Definitely better than Windows XP.

2. Uses less Memory

3. Installation and Drivers

4. Task bar and Task bar preview

I like this feature where by similar open windows docks onto itself. Moving the mouse over the docked application will pop-up a small preview of the app.

Another feature is the Contexual Task Window – Right-Click on an application icon on the taskbar and you will get relevant histories or short-cuts. As far as I know this feature only works with Microsofts own applications and Google Chrome. There might be other new apps available but I have not tried them.

5. Libraries

6. Device Management

Now you have a centralised place for device management. All your connected devices like printers and thumbdrives and others are shown neatly with icon representing them.

7. Side-by-side window auto-resize

A very good feature when typing or comparing documents. I can drag a window to the edge and it will auto snap and adjust to half a screen. Do the same to another window and you have two windows adjusted nicely side by side. Even better, if you drag the window back away from the edge, it goes back to the size it was before.

8. Resource Monitor

9. Fine tune notifications

10. Unified Window Size

The package includes:

• Dreamweaver CS4
• Flash CS4 Professional
• Photoshop CS4 Extended
• Illustrator CS4
• Fireworks CS4
• Acrobat 9 Pro
• Soundbooth CS4
• Contribute CS4
• Adobe Bridge CS4
• Adobe Device Central CS4
• Version Cue CS4

Absolutely fantastic deal for students and academics. The Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Southbooth is definitely much more useful to me than anything else in the package.

Go to mine.com.sg and make your purchase now! This anyway is for Singaporeans only.

Image from mine.com.sg

1. Heat issues

My Macbook Pro might have a great and smooth design. I even call it sexy. But I have no idea all those heat will go. Just using the Mac to surf web and edit some documents can get it heated up. Imagine using it for video editing and conversion. Definitely not lap friendly unless you want your precious jewels cooked.
I do hear the fan spinning now and then but cant figure out where the hell is the exhaust, if there is one at all.

2. Trashed Items Can’t Be Opened

If you accidently moved item to the trash and want to open it to check the contents first. Mac does not allow that. That is fine by me, but cant it have a prompt asking me if I want to restore to the desktop or move it back to place it was deleted from?
I have to right-click (control+click) to get the context menu and click “Put Back”.

3. Permission issues

Even though I have not really come across this permission issue, I have heard enough problems to write about it. Mac OS X is built to be robust, secure multiuser operating system. Each user has set of permission which will not allow you to screw up another users files and settings. Great! That’s the good side of permissions.

The problem is that for Macs with only one user, permissions often get in the way of performing common tasks such as updating system components, deleting files, renaming folders, and so on. Since I am the only user and administrator, why do I need to enter my own password again to do some stuff?

4. No cut and paste in Finder

I was thinking this is an issue with iPhone’s previous OS. It has been resolved on version 3 onwards.
No cut and paste. Yes, there is no Cut option in the Finder. You have the Copy option but not Cut. Why?
Yes, I can drag and drop. But if I want to move a file/folder to another folder that is pretty deeply nested, I will want to cut and paste. I can copy but no cut and paste.

5. No Universal Uninstaller

I love that applications in OS X are for the most part self contained. Installation is a breeze by dragging and dropping the application to the Applications folder. Uninstalling for most apps are easy to. Just drag it to the Trash. But for applications like Adobe Photoshop CS3, or Apple’s own Final Cut Studio, they are not self contained and to properly uninstall, one needs to resort to third party apps like AppDelete and AppZapper. Why should I use a third party app to do this when it should be built into the system.

6. Finder Treats FTP Volumes as Read-Only

If you want to be a ftp client why dont it be a full fledged one with write access to the ftp site.
You can connect to a FTP server by clicking Go > Connect to Server. Key in user id and password and you are good to go. Thats what you think until you try to upload or edit some stuff on the remote server. Really sucks!

7. Finder Views Don’t Update Immediately

The Finder used to always update as soon as a change was made to a file, but now that’s not always the case. Maybe it is a minor issue or one time issue with my system. Even after downloading some stuff if I view the item via Finder, it should show the progress ie increase of file size. It doesnt do so on my Mac. It stays static till I refressh it. I have not noticed this behavior in Windows.

8 Delete key

Delete key is just the backspace. WTF. You can get used to it but I just simply wanna delete why do I need to press command+delete.

9. Sleep mode

When you close the lid the mac goes into sleep mode. The latest macs goes to this mode called the deep sleep(mode 3). It will write a copy to the disk as well as the RAM. In case, the battery power is lost, the current state can be restored when you power up the machine the next time.

This is all fine. But I am trying to look for a mode where it does this sleep and goes into hibernation which is write contents of RAM to disk and power off. I have used IBM and Lenovo and Acer notebooks on various Windows OS and it does it right. When the lid is closed it goes to sleep. After maybe 10 to 15 minutes(configurable) it will hibernate. Yes my Macs battery can last for many hours (6hr +) but it would be good if it hibernates and does not drain battery. When I turn it on a couple of days later, I dont want to see that I am unable to power on due to battery discharged.

OpenOffice

This is one of the popular and excellent piece of Office Suite. It is open source and hence free to use. It is able read and write Microsoft Office formats with ease.

It comes with Writer (MS Word), Calc (Excel), Impress(Powerpoint) and Base(Access).

IBM Lotus Symphony

Another popular and powerful suite. It is actually derived from OpenOffice.

You can do word processing, presentations and spreadsheet with ease.

Concluding

I am currently using the IBM Lotus Symphony right now. The layout is different and at times I get confused where to find the options. Though all the options are present right on the screen, being used to Microsoft Office my mind naturally looks for similar UI.

OpenOffice has layout that is similar to MS Office and easy to use. Here I am talking about layout of MS office 2003 and earlier. The latest versions of MS Office has ‘sucky’ layout. Ribbon?

If you dont want to spend a dime use one of the recommended Office Suites.

Basically it is an entire Security Suite – Anti-Virus and Anti-malware.

I am wondering if it will do its job comparable to other Security vendors like Symantec and McAfee. Will it put them out of business? Definitely a NO.