Got my mbp!

So my friend called me yesterday at about 23.30 that she was home and I could go get my awesome computer, and in what seemed like 2 seconds, I was already at her door. I think I averaged like 150kph Sadly, to avoid crazy custom charges and whatnot she had to take it out of the box and put inside the black mamba pack (which i will refer from now on as the black mamba) and say it was hers from before, so no unboxing for me but she still kept the white thinger that the mbp and macbook come wrapped in.

Needless to say, I haven't slept! lol. -_-

I erase & installed leopard again and saved myself 10 gigs on programs I don't use, and spent all night restoring all my dvd backups and setting up boot camp.

Coming from a macbook, I can appreciate the extra screen real state, the edges of the palm rest area aren't as sharp so that's nice too! The keyboard backlight is awesome! I actually forgot about the sensors so when I turned off the lights and the backlight kicked in on the keyboard and the screen dimmed all by itself I was like NICE!

And like pretty much everyone else has said, even though the mbp is heavier than the macbook, somehow it feels lighter. The mb feels more dense, I guess you have to try it for yourself to know what I'm talking about. Everything so far works like a charm.

I haven't used osx that much yet, since I've been playing Gears of War all freaking night. I went to laptopvideo2go.com and got the 169.04 drivers with the modified .inf, didn't really know which others to get, I tried 169.01 with modified inf as well but after restarting my screen had only like 16 colors and scaled back to 640x480, after trying .04 everything worked great!

I haven't played WoW yet cause I only started downloading all the updates 2 hours ago, but Gears....man, what a game, After starting the game I let it run at automatic settings, which were everything set to high except something on medium I can't remember, and resolution at 1280x760, and everything looks freaking great and silky smooth, not one framerate drop even during heavy fights, I can't really tell exact fps because I don't know how, it's been a while since I gamed on computers, before WoW, the last time I played a computer game was in 2000 I think, Red Alert 2

If anyone has any questions please let me know, specially the people that still have macbooks and are wondering wether to upgrade or not to a mbp.

As for the bag, it's great! It's actually bigger than I expected, but the material feels very high quality and looks like it will do what I wanted, which is carry my mbp and lots of other crap, like books or a change of clothes for training or whatever. After I spend more time with it I will consider writing a review for it here, since Booq reviews are pretty scarce around the web.

Any questions? I'll post some pics later today

 

That's awesome dude! Congrats on your new baby!

 

Grats man :-D

Gears is an AMAZING game. Controls were great on the 360, but I kinda wanna try it under XP as well.

Grats, and it's about time!

And which bag did you get?

 

It's called the mamba pack, from Booq. Here are some pics:

 

Sweet. I'm looking at getting a Tom Bihn set if I get a new ultra portable.

But jeez... that bag looks cavernous.

 

I dont mean to be a butt or anything but why did you choose to buy a Macbook Pro over a non Mac? I mean with that money you could have bought a much more powerful notebook. Just wanted to know =]

 

Yeah it's big, but not THAT big. Inside though, you it looks like you can fit so much!

No it's ok! hahah. I know I could've gotten a laptop with better specs, but I want osx. I've had a macbook since may and have grown to LOVE osx, I can't live without it. Due to circumstances in my country I was able to sell my used macbook for the same price of a new low-end macbook pro. So really since I want osx the only choice for me was a macbook pro, since I wanted something mobile, professional looking, and had decent gaming capabilities.

I like windows xp sure, but if osx ports ran as good as they did on xp, I would have very little reason to use it, except for the occasional programming app on parallels.

 

congrats fez! i know its gonna be hard to put down ur mbp as i didnt even want to leave mine for about a week haha

i remember reading about how you wanted to get windows. how did you manage to get it?

 

Nice bag

 

Someone at the office bought vista in the states, so he gave me his xp pro license if I took him for lunch.

Thank you, I haven't tested it out yet because I haven't taken my mbp out of the house, but tomorrow I will put it through it's paces.

 

good to see you managed to get it ok, it is a shame it is such a difficult process.

 

Ah well, it's nothing really. If anything, the difficult process of getting it makes me appreciate it even more.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention, I got a matte display (it's the amazon standard), I was a little scared, but I am glad to say that I absolutely love it. I actually like it more than glossy

 

The bag is gorgeous! I'd love to get one.

and does the Matte screen feel any different? Like if you were to wipe it or something does it feel different?

 

Yeah the bag really is nice. The material feels so nice I almost wanna use it as a pillow.

The screen looks different, but doesn't feel different. I mean, if you touch it, it feels the same, but it looks tougher. The colors are amazing, there are no reflections whatsoever, and it doesn't pick up as much dust or cat hair (I have a cat), so yeah it's awesome! I would go as far as to say that I will never buy a laptop with a glossy display ever again. It also makes it look a lot more professional than a mbp with a glossy display, in my opinion.

From today on I will be a preacher of the matte following. But as usual, it is personal preference. I suggest you go to an apple store and decide for yourself before spending $2,000 on it. Honestly if i had the choice, I would've bought a glossy display, but I had no choice since amazon only carries mbp's with matte displays.

 

Alrighty, I have some pics, taken with a crappy digital camera so yeah.



Yep, one with flash and one without. This camera is probably older than my grandma, I actually plan on getting a new one soon cause I'm going on a cruise in february and I wanna take decent pictures.

So yeah there's the mbp with the black mamba at it's side so you can kinda see how big it is, if anyone wants different angles let me know.

Also I plan on connecting the mbp to my 26" panasonic viera hdtv with a dvi to hdmi cable. Anyone have any experience with that? I just have to buy the cable.

 

Congrats on your new MBP! Oh and the black mamba bag looks pretty awesome. At first I thought it was Beatrix Kiddo (AKA The Bride), the main character in the Kill Bill movies lol.

 

Thanks! Well to be honest, the fact the bag is called the black mamba accounted for.... maybe 25% of the reason why I chose that bag. lol .

 

Hey, congrats on getting your MBP, 00fez!

 

Congratulations on your new Mac!

Be sure to read the <noparse>Apple</noparse> Forum Stickies: Mac Switcher's Guide and Running Windows on a Mac: Boot Camp, Parallels & VMware Fusion. You may also find these links helpful: Mac 101 and Switch 101.



j/k Nice pics!!!

 

Yay! Congrats! I got mine 2 months ago and I still ogle it whenever I can. It'll probably get a complex soon!

Definitely a killer system, and so damn quiet! Just be sure to give it good ventilation since it does run very warm. At default 2000rpm, my CPU usually sits about 50c on my laptop stand, which is aluminium itself, so bear this in mind! I use SMCFancontrol to have it idle at 2500RPM instead. Negligible sound difference, but about 5C difference in CPU temps, which is sweet!

And most of all, enjoy your new bad boy (and the laptop too!!! )

 

Ah yes, I forgot to mention,

Gears was great on 360.
Yes, I'm a girl who's played gears on a 360. But it was craazy fun.

 

Thanks Xander, Sam!

Will, I actually have my fans running at 3600rpm, it's what I did with my macbook, using osx I usually hover around 40 degrees.

I never played gears on 360, I guess the hefty price tag here [of the xbox360] turned me off, but I'm glad to be able to play it now since I've always wanted to give it a try!

It's nice to see we have some ladies trotting about here. I wonder how many more we have...

 

how much does a 360 go for there? I was thinking I should fly down there, sell my MBP and buy a new one. It's well worth the cost IMHO

 

360's usually go for around $1500, maybe a little less if you know where to shop, here though, they come with a chip pre-installed that enables you to play burned copies. Nobody in their right mind would pay $150 for a game here, when all most people make is about $250 a month. Here we have a pirate in every intersection selling illegal copies of games, movies, etc, for like $2

 

holy cow! Maybe I'll go down there and sell my 360 w/ HD-DVD addon and my MBP and come back and buy new stuff lol.

And do you get to play on North American servers? My old WoW guild had some guys from Ireland and Australia. Not sure why the Irish guy didn't just play on a EU server (he eventually got banned cause he was playing on a US server).

Just curious how that works in Venezuela.

 

I'm playing on a US server right now, my ex-gf buys me 60-day time cards cause I need a US credit card in order to do the monthly thing. You played WoW before? What level did you reach?

 

oh yeah I played WoW for over two years, but I only played between semesters. Well, occasionally I would play during the semester when I had a bit of downtime (which was rare, since I was pulling about 16 hours at the University a day).
I had a 70 paladin and several toons in the 30's and 40's. I just can't... seem to get back into the game now. I've tried... but when the new expansion comes out I may delve back in.

And don't ever play on a RP-PVP server (where my 70 is on). Alliance are pansy RP players and hte Horder are hard-core PVP'ers. Not a good mix lol.

 

hahahah, I'll keep that in mind! Right now I'm playing on a normal non-pvp server, this was my first online rpg so I wanted to go little by little. I only have a lvl 35 night elf, and when I don't play my brother uses my account to play with his orc warrior, I forget what level he's at.

I know what you mean about school though. I NEVER play during the weekdays, with work, school, and all the baby-sitting (I have 3 younger siblings), I don't have time for anything! Not to mention volleyball, which is a time hog, friendly games, tournaments, all the training...aaaah. Kill me Thankfully the weekends are more relaxed so I get to play a lot then. Thank god for that rested xp...

 

heh... yeah man, lot of people make fun of people playing on normal servers. It's the way to go if you want to play the game IMHO. I've been on two PVP servers, and it's lame. I mean, I don't see whats so great about getting camped for an hour by a 70 when you're trying to level in your teens or 20's... or 30's... 40's... 50's...
Granted, I like to PVP, but I want it to be controlled. On several occasions, we've had 40v40 groups that have randomly formed in places like Hillsbrad that was a blast.

Be careful with account sharing. I assume you boht live in the same place, but Blizzards Warden will check to see what IP you log in at, and if there is another log in at the same time at a different IP... BANNED!

My big beef with WoW is that they tried to make the end game content more accesible to the casual players by making the raids 10 man... but completely ruined it :-/

Rested XP rocks I would generally level two toons at the same time. Get some levels on one guy, let him rest for a week while leveling another.

BTW, I recommend mining and leatherworking as two skills for your primary character. You can make a boat load of money off selling the ore and leather on the AH. I mean a boat load.

 

Ah yeah I'm not worrying about account sharing, he uses our desktop at home, which is behind my wireless router, so the external ip is all the same.

 

x) I don't own a 360, like you said, it's a bit pricey and I rather spend my money on black paint & an Intuos3 SE.

I haven't seen too many, Nicki, Lynn, Sharee...

 

Ah thats good. Blizz is such sticklers about sharing accounts

I'd also be VERY careful about telling people that you are not in the US. Piss the wrong 13 year old off, and your account is banned. That is unless you're allowed to play on the US servers. Not sure how they handles areas/countries where they don't have servers up for.

I loled at the black paint thing...