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MacBook

Last weekend I got a new black 13" MacBook:

I didn't get a MacBook Pro because 15" or 17" is just too big. I like smaller laptops that you can actually fit on your lap. If they had smaller MacBook Pros like the old 12" PowerBook I used to have, I would have gotten one of those.

The MacBooks are also a lot cheaper than the Pros, so it was much easier to justify financially since I my old laptop (now dead) was only about 2 years old. The $100 UW student discount didn't hurt either (the Microsoft employee discount was also $100 so I could have used that too, but it just seems weird to use a Microsoft discount to buy an Apple laptop).

Fortunately it has 2 GB of RAM so I can run XP on it OK. I am using the 30-day trial of VMware Fusion and so far I am not impressed. I might try Parallels Workstation to see if that's better, but I doubt it will be.

Fusion's "Unity" mode runs Windows apps as native Mac OS windows, like so:

This all works fine and dandy until you try to do anything fancy, such as activate Exposé:

Doh! Look at the Notepad window overlapping the Calculator window. This is obviously due to limitations of the GDI rendering model (namely, windows cannot paint themselves when they are obscured by other windows), but I think VMware might be able to work around it in a future patch. In the meantime, however, it looks really bad. There are a lot of other weird bugs like this that make the overall experience very poor.

The other main adoption-blocker for VMware Fusion is that when you boot up your Boot Camp partition, Windows detects that your hardware has changed, and prompts you to re-activate. You can eventually get it activated, but every time you switch between Boot Camp or VMware, it forces you to re-activate. VMware has instructions in their support forums for supposedly fixing this problem, but they do not work. This essentially makes it unusable, which is really too bad.

Oh WGA, how we hate you