I Give Up

It's just about a year since I bought my Core i5 MacBook Pro and I give up!

Constant problems with network connections, performance issues with the Adobe suite of products, the Pizza Wheel of Death or Beach Ball of Death which ever you prefer and many other problems have finally made me give up. I have ordered a new Sony Vaio to replace the aging Vaio that sits next to my Mac and performs flawlessly running the same applications plus some the Mac can't run.

Once I get my new Vaio I will report honestly and try to compare the two computers in terms of performance and reliability. My old Vaio has not crashed for months maybe a new higher performance one will!

Update to iMac - RIP iMac

Today, after prompting, we attempted to update the iMac. Now the iMac is dead, tried booting from a DVD and running First Aid with no success. Maybe this is Apples way of making you upgrade to a later model?

Update

Now it's some 6 months or so since I got my Mac. I still have to re-start it practically every day if I am using it. Photoshop CS5 still crashes (the last time - 5 mins ago I had just saved a document and the document could not be edited, force close of CS5), I found that Photoshop could be made to go a little faster by changing some setting in the preferences file and I found that if I used Photoshop and ANY other application everything starts to go super slow.

The latest minor annoyance is that I installed Carbonite on the Mac and after deciding it would not work for me I could not uninstall it and I still have the annoying little symbol in the task bar.

The Windows/Linux network works one day an not the next, no apparent reason. None of the other computers on the network have any of these problems, except, of course, our iMac.

If I want to create a folder on the network I can only use one of the Windows machines because (new with 10.6 OSX) folders created on the Macs are locked to any other users. Also with two identical Buffalo NAS servers set EXACTLY the same on the same Switch one connects automatically and appears on the desktop and the other can only connect using a manual connection.

My trusty old Sony Vaio has not bee re-booted for, well weeks. Despite its age and processor if performs practically the same as the Mac except its more reliable. I am thinking of dumping the iMac and getting a new PC at the moment.

File Sharing Mac to PC

Well I finally found some information direct from Apple which, at least, lets me understand whats going on.

To recap our old I-Mac worked juts fine on our Windows and NAS network until we upgraded to OS 10.6. The MacbookPro, which runs 10.6 has never worked correctly.

For example we can create a folder on one of the NAS servers but when we try and copy a file to it we are informed we do not have permission, we also do not get the message until the file has copied over and then is rejected, a process that takes a long time with a large file.

Well it seems that Apple stopped supporting Appletalk protocol with 10.6, why this make a difference, I don't know, but it does.

The bottom line, in order to move files from the Mac to the PC network we have to use an external drive - i.e. move files from the Macs to USB drive then move USB drive to any PC and move the files from the USB drive to the NAS server. Of course on the PC's we simply save to the network drive.

I am sure that I am doing something wrong but I did call Apple Care and had my call escalated to a "specialist" and he could not help at all. Except by saying that Mac's might not support NAS drives!

MacbookPro = Double the price and complexity (but it does look pretty!)

More Permission Issues

Oh my god what a pain OSX Leopard is. Do they call it Leopard because it's scary and untrainable. How about being able to do a SIMPLE task like copy a file from a Mac to a NAS network drive running Linux.

Most of the thousands of posts about this suggest opening up terminal and using Unix line command, what is this fucking MS-DOS

Great!

Here's another great feature of the Mac (not) so this morning I opened a file on the network, adjusted it and saved it. Then a little later I opened it again, printed it and went to close the file and it gave me an " cannot save this file because of permissions" message.

No matter I thought, I have not changed it since I saved so I just closed it. The file has now gone! Disappeared . . . wha . . .the f . . .

File Permissions - This time with Zipped files

I think I have mentioned before the nightmares we are having with file permissions on the Macs with Leopard. I guess it's because, like Windows, everyone is worried about security. Judging by the thousands of posts you will find if you type "Leopard Permissions" into Google I am not alone (the first post is Leopard permission Nightmare).

Today I received a two files from a student, both of which were zipped on a Mac at school. Can extracted them on any of the Macs here NO. Windows can!

It's a real P*I*T*A that every small job I try to do on the Mac offers up some kind of roadblock that make me go back to my trusty Vaio.