Switching to a Macintosh – a mixed feeling
December 1st, 2008 by adminAs a photographer I always get the question why are you not using a Mac? I have always answered that for bang for the buck a branded (in my case, my current one is a Fujitsu) Windows notebook is better. Though the question on why I am not a Mac started to annoy me and I started questioning myself why am I not on a Mac? Pretty much everyone in the house already using Mac, why not me? Fortunately with the quick revamping of models by Apple, the used market is flooded with affordable Macs. In fact the price is similar to what I would spend for a similarly equiped Windows notebook. So after finding one at a price I can afford I jumped on the purchase. This is what I got:
Macbook Pro 2.4 ghz Santa Rosa / 4 gb RAM / 250 gb HD / Superdrive 8x DVD burner / GeForce 8600M GT 256mb /with applecare till Jan 2011
After getting the unit, I have to admit the notebook does look gorgeuos, much slimmer than my current notebook and also much lighter. So I proceeded with loading all my neccesary softwares and some reccomended softwares from friends using a Mac. After all this is done, I tried working with my new notebook to edit some photos, it was blazingly fast. For the first time I wasn’t afraid of surfing to any websites, since when I was using a Windows notebook I need to make sure I would not visit suspicous site in fear of getting a virus and etc. Also now I don’t fear borrowing thumbdrives, downloading from memory cards that I don’t own and receiving emails with virus.
But just like any marriage, the honeymoon stage had to end sometime, in my case a week. As I was reading through sites about Mac’s and watching videos from Apple site, I discovered Time machine, a built in back up utility on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The problems is since it does incremental back-ups on a fairly regular basis, I was worried it would eat up my external drive rather quickly, so a new one is in order. Since the Macbook Pro only has 2 USB ports and owning quite a handful of USB peripherals (External DVD writer, scanner, card reader and a mouse), I decided that I should look for an external hard drive that can utilize my Macbook Pro’s firewire ports. So I purchased a Western Digital My Book Studio 750 gb, I partitioned it so that I have 300 gb for my time machine. Since the drive seems large enough, I also share that drive for one of our Macbook’s time machine, since the Macbook’s files are not as sensitive, what I do is eject disc from the Macbook Pro and connect the external hard drive to the Macbook through firewire 400. Suddenly after a few days of doing this I noticed my Macbook Pro’s start up time of under a minute suddenly became closer to 5 minutes this when the External Drive is connected but start up is quick if not connected. So I searched around and saw some possible solutions, one was to reset PRAM, that didn’t help. I also tried placing the External hard drive in the privacy tab of spotlight, then removing it, so that it can rebuild what seems to be a corrupted database, no help either. I also tried reformatting the backup partition. Suddenly it worked, but only until I plugged the drive to the Macbook again. This time I tried to just delete the backup partition of the external drive and not connect it to the Macbook anymore, still start-up was still as slow. So I did an update of my Mac OS, manually deleting the spotlight database, have spotlight rebuild the database and guess what, worst happens. Now it won’t even boot up I am just stuck at the gray screen with an Apple logo, this is until I remove the External drive and hit the power button and it start-up is back to normal. This not the only errors I have noticed, when I checked my console I notice in the log some of these errors (there is more):
11/30/08 8:35:22 PM mDNSResponder[22] WARNING: sandbox_init error Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.bsd.dirhelper err=1100Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.distributed_notifications.2 err=1100Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.ocspd err=1100Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.mDNSResponderHelper err=1100Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.SecurityServer err=1100Could not set Mach lookup policy for service com.apple.SystemConfiguration.configd er
11/30/08 8:46:29 PM mds[21] (/Volumes/Backup/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/5F1DEE1A-C243-4172-8F0C-32EAB09D9A36)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/5F1DEE1A-C243-4172-8F0C-32EAB09D9A36/live.0.; needs recovery
12/1/08 12:43:58 AM Finder[126] [QL ERROR] Generator database update takes too long… we will use what we currently have
12/1/08 2:06:48 AM diskarbitrationd[31] unable to probe /dev/disk2 (status code 0xFFFFFFFC).
12/1/08 2:06:48 AM kernel disk2: I/O error.
12/1/08 9:23:53 PM mdworker[130] -[ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook] Can’t ABACQUIRE_FILE_LOCK /SourceCache/AddressBook/AddressBook-696/Framework/AddressBook/ABAddressBook.m:3165
Honestly I have never had any of these with any of my past Windows notebook, I was usually 100% migrated to the new notebook within a day or two, in this case it’s now around 2 weeks and I can’t still abandon my Windows notebook, since I don’t want to trust my Mac until I resolve all these problems.
I am ready to give up and just sell my newly aquired Macbook Pro and just stick with the Windows system. Though Windows are used by the majority thus Virus and other security problems are part of the Windows experience, having such a wider user base, information of problems on the net are easy to find, thus fixing a problematic Windows seems, in my case, much easier. This Macbook Pro in 2 weeks time have already freezed up twice on me, as opposed to my Windows experience which is much less, or roughly once every 2 months. Now I don’t know if its the Macintosh OS or my HD is the problem. People have suggested to just unplug the external drive before booting up, I agree this will work, but not really a solution but a workaround that I never had to do in my Windows notebook where I leave 2 external hard drive connected and I can safely start up and shut down without any problems.
Here is my last option that I am planning to do very soon, clean install of Leopard, reformat external hard drive, and hope it will solve all my problems, since I really want to keep it, but if I am not able to use it properly then I have no choice but to give up.
Posted in Equipment Reviews | 
5 Comments »
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Hi Ken, sorry to hear about your bad experience. When I migrated to Leopard, I also wanted to try out Time Machine. It’s really great! The only problem was I didn’t have enough space on my hard drives: 250GB, 40GB, 20GB mainly because my MB had an internal 320GB. I had Time Machine switched off now until I get Time Capsule. However I didn’t delete any spotlight database, I didn’t touch any part of OS X, not even deleting some system preferences.
Now it’s true that having a plugged FireWire external hard drive will take a bit of time starting up your Mac, especially after a system update, it later on works normally since the OS is rescanning the FW bus.
Having a powered USB bus helps with all your USB peripherals. I own an old LaCie 250GB mini hard drive and hub and it’s still great after over two years of daily use.
Ever since I took out Time Machine, I use additional external drives for my workflow. The aforementioned LaCie is where all my daily files would go. My new LaCie Little Big Disk 320GB with Raid 0 handles all my DNG/PSD/TIF files. And another Western Digital MyBook Studio 500GB as backup.
What I actually need now is a FireWire 800 hub, cause 3 of my peripherals have FW800 ports in them, like the Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader, which coincidentally is mentioned here: http://www.ncarandang.com
Also, if you will be needing your partition as a boot drive that you need Disk Utility to partition it as GUID because Intel-based Macs are using that structure. More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
Hope this helps, and am pretty sure your last option will definitely work.
December 4th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Hi Ken,
I do not have the Macbook Pro, I do however have the 24′ iMac. I find that working with the Mac system to be much more comfortable then Windows as everyday passes. I too was a “windows” guy since my first 386sx with 2MB of Ram and a 150MB hard drive.
I still have both a Windows machine and my iMac. Although the big question for me last summer was when I Purchased CS3.. the decision was a hard one as its an expensive program and I had to choose between the too systems. It happen to be that I was looking around for a good LCD screen that I ran across an article stating that the 24′ iMac had the NEC 24 Ippsis LCD screen built in it. The choice was then made and I am happy with my Mac.
I don’t use the Time Machine feature, what I do is back up only my files that I need using a program called NTI Shadow and my Fantom 1TB NAS Drive. I also tend to back up the Fantom drive with another one from time to time. Perhaps if you just focus on the files you need to protect and not the whole operating system it will keep your Mac running well.
Kyle
December 4th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I agree that the Mac OS is much simpler and easier to use, given everything works fine. My biggest gripe is fixing problems when it occurs. My Windows system maybe prone to more errors, but solutions and fixes are easy, which is the complete opposite in my experience with Mac OS.
Ken
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Y dont you get windows 7? this is more faster than older windows.
April 4th, 2010 at 1:18 am
Switching to MAC wasn’t all about the speed, in fact I noticed that given the same specs, a Windows based computer against a Mac will process about the same time. My main issue has always been virus, so unless Windows 7 is not succeptible to virus, it’s not much better than the older Windows in my situation.