Yet Another Soon to be MBP Owner in Need of Guidence

Hello all,
Believe it or not this is yet another post from a college student in the process of purchasing a new MBP who's appealing to the venerable Apple discussion board community for guidance. My dilemma is not that I can't decide on what MBP I want or what features I need, I've already decided on a top of the line model with the 7200 RPM hard drive and a Crucial ram upgrade, it's that I can't decide when would be the best time to make the purchase given the WWDC keynote on the 7th of August. I would like to get the most bang for my three grand but I need have the computer up and running by the twenty-first with Windows installed to run AutoCad. Would you recommend waiting until the 7th to order the computer and see it the MBP's are updated with the hope an updated MBP would be able to get to me in time or should I buy now with the knowledge that I'll be buying a computer that will be updated, but not outdated, soon?
Thanks for your time,
Eric
PowerBook 12-inch 867

I am also a college student... and I was going to wait for the new merom, but I decided against it... I just think the likelyhood of them released before september is unlikely in my head... but you never know... But I looked at it this way... I wanted a MBP bad, despite all the problems I heard about them (my mbp has no problems to this day).... I figured if I waited for the new releases, the only thing that would change is the fact that it's basically a new computer, and with new computers come with new problems... I also figured, the likelyhood of the computers being released before my school started was slim, so I bought it now. I am very happy with my MBP right now, and you have to think of it this way, there will always be upgrades, whos to say that after the merom has been released, something new will becoming after that... I find it less painful to buy a MBP in july, and have the meroms be released months later, then purchasing it in september, and having them be released a possible weeks later... a little less painful, but that's my input, do what you want, I have a 17" MBP , week 26, and I am a happy camper!

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Advice for Soon-to-be MacPro Owner. Need Recs for Best Practices...

I'll be getting a Quad Core 3 Ghz with 1GB of RAM, a 250Gig HD, the ATI X1900 card. It will be my first mac after five years (replacing a well-used G4 Tibook 1Ghz).
First the pressing questions: Thanks to the advice of many on this board, I'll be buying 4GB of RAM from Crucial (and upgrading the HD down the road when needs warrant).
1) Am I able to add the new RAM with the 1G that the system comes with? Or will they be incompatible, requiring me to uninstall the shipped RAM?
Another HUGE issue I've been struggling with is whether or not to batch migrate the entire MacPro with everything that's on my TiBook. I have so many legacy apps, fonts that I probably don't use any more and probably have contributed to intermittent crashes and performance issues. I'm leaning towards fresh installs of my most crucial apps: photoshop w/ plugins, lightroom, firefox with extensions and just slowly and systematically re-installing software as the need arises.
Apart from that...I'd like to get a consensus as to new system best practices. What should I be doing/buying to ensure and establish a clean, maintenance-lite, high-performance running machine?

I believe you will end up with 2x512mb ram from the Apple store. If you want to add 4gb more you'll want to get 4x1gb ram sticks. 5gb ram is never an "optimal" amount but people talk like it's bad or something but it's simply that the last gig of ram isn't accessed quite as fast. You'll want to change the placement so the 4x1 sticks are "first" and will be all paired up nicely so your other two 512 sticks only get accessed when needed. A little searching here will turn up explanations for how best to populate the ram for your situation. It's still better to have 5 gigs where the 5th gig of ram isn't quite as fast than 4. They will not be incompatible but you WILL want to uninstall the original RAM, then put in the 4gigs into the optimal slots then add the other two 512 chips.
Do fresh installs. Absolutely. Then only add those fonts that you really need. If you use a ton of fonts I'd get some font checking app that will verify them.
I don't use RAID for my home machine. I use 4 internal 500gig drives. One is my boot, the other is my data (although it is now full and I'll be adding a pair of external FW). Each HD has a mirror backup drive. I use SuperDuper to create a clone of my Boot drive only after a period of a week or two of rock solid performance following any system update. Then I don't touch it till another update or installation of an app followed by a few weeks of solid performance with all of my critical apps. That allows me to update quicktime or a security update without concern...because some of those updates really cause havoc with people. If I have a problem (and it has happened) I just boot from my other drive and clone that known-good drive back to the other. I also backup my data drive "manually" with Superduper.
You will get higher performance with Raid of course, but doing that requires three drives (two for performance and one for backup) just for data-scratch, as well as two more for boot and backup of boot. Some folks can fit all their boot and data on one drive but photoshop and many other apps (FCP) really prefer data to be on a separate disk. My setup isn't the absolute fastest, but for me it's a very solid, low maintenance,good performing setup.

Yet another Mac Book Pro (A1211/2.33 GHz) freeze problem

Hi everyone,
I have yet another freeze mystery, if people fancy having a crack at it.
I had this notebook for about 4 and a half years and it served me well until 2 months ago. It is a 15' MBP from December 2008 (A1211) with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM.
Now I constantly get lags or freezes while I am using it.It manifests itself via the beachball and a frozen screen. First, I thought it was the hard drive but I replaced it with a tested new one and I still get the same behaviour. The reason I thought it was the HD is that it seems to freeze often when there was a lot of access to HD or memory. For example, firefox would cause a freeze quite often when it was trying to access the cache or history. I get the same behaviour when trying indexing my music for the genius feature. Often when I close applications, it will halt the system for about 2 minutes.
I think the number of lags also correlates with temperature. I am pretty sure that the notebook's heat diffusion properties has deteriorated strongly over the past year as it seems to be using the fans a lot more extensively. The heatsink seems to get really hot these days as well. So my next step would be checking the thermal paste on the heat sink. Before I am going to do that, I want to consider any remaining options as dismantling the laptop up to the heatsink is a bit of a pain.
My gut feeling would be that it has to do either with the memory or maybe some 'bridge' that transfers the data between HD, GPU, CPU and memory. I am aware that bridge is the wrong word and I am simplifying the architecture of the mainboard too much, but I am sure you get what I mean. The data rate between some of those is inhibited.
The reason why I am saying some is that often the system seems overwhelmed by the amount of commands, just sits there and then resumes executing all of them as it had taken a break. This can be easily seen when streaming video in a web browser. I often get the beach ball and my whole screen freezes, but the movie, or at least the sound, keeps running in the background. After a while it usually resumes and shows the movie at the current playing position. Sometimes it doesn't recover, not even after 30 minutes and I have to switch it off.
I hope I provided enough information for you guys to have a think about this.
Any help in this matter would be gratefully appreciated.

Before re-installing the operating system, which might also work, I found this article helpful:
http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Fix-Spod-How-To-Fix-A-Spinning-Pinwheel -Of-Death.htm
I've followed the directions since they seem to make sense and am waiting for the next Pinwheel of Death. They seem to be saying the same thing you are Chris, but ascribe the problem to 'permissions' which are fixable (gasp) via the OS disc utility.

HT204368 After I updated my iphone 4 to ios 6.1.3 I can no longer connect to my bluetooth plantronics model M25. I tried reset all settings after turning on and off also submitted diagnostic. Do I have to buy yet another bluetooth set?

After I updated my iphone 4 to ios 6.1.3 I can no longer connect to my bluetooth, plantronics model M25. I tried reset all settings after turning on and off also submitted diagnostic. Do I have to buy yet another bluetooth set?

Thank you wjsten for your soon reply. Unfortunately on these days I'm in a country that Apple don't have any retail store here and for sake of time I prefer to fix it myself to DHL it to the nearest country to use its warranty. Do you have any idea how can I fix it? Do you think it's a software issue?

Unibody MBP owners with *working* external displays, please chime in.

I'm trying to determine if there's any use at this time to try to exchange the MBP (unibody) I have now with another unit in the hopes of getting proper external display support. (To be clear, I'm referring to the external display problems many of us are having, like in this thread, and this one, and others.)
I'm sure there are others suffering from this problem who are simply seeking another datapoint in determining whether or not exchanging one's unibody MBP for another are of any use at this time. So the question here is:
If you have a unibody MBP, and you are successfully driving an external monitor without issue (using the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter), can you kindly post the following information?
1) External display model (manufacturer and model)
2) External display screen resolution
3) Any information about DVI cable, length, brand if applicable, etc.
4) Have you confirmed proper operation in both 9400 and 9600 GPU modes?
5) If you know, is your MBP equipped with the 9c84 or 9c85 built-in display panel?
6) If your setup wasn't originally working, but now is working due to a unit swap or swapping out of the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter with a new one, can you kindly note that?
Please do not consider yourself representative of a properly working external display setup if yours looks mostly good, with just minor artifacting--that is, for the purpose of this thread, please consider "working" to mean only perfectly normal operation of an external monitor from your unibody MBP.
Are all of the above points necessarily relevant? I don't know yet, but I figured it's best to try to get as much information from those who have working units, to try to determine what's relevant and what isn't.
Why am I asking this? Because I've already wasted enough time with this unibody MacBook Pro, now on my third unit, and I do not want to waste time making trips to the store to exchange units (and the time necessary for restoring to the new unit, etc.) if it's not going to help things. (The previous two replacements had nothing to do with this particular problem, and I didn't have my external display until the third unit, so have no idea if the previous two suffered from this particular problem or not.) If it seems that an exchange from one unibody MBP to another isn't going to help, then those of us who need to resolve this might learn more information with which to make a decision. Right now, I'm seriously considering exchanging for the current 17" MBP with matte display, even though it's not the new unibody design, and doesn't quite match up in the specifications with the new 15" MBP--I just need to get my setup working, and figure the older style of the 17" might be more tested and worked out.
Thanks in advance to those of you who fit the bill and answer these questions.
NOTE: If you have more relevant information to ask of those with working setups, please do; but please avoid the discussion of your problems if you're among the ones (like me) with external display issues, as there are other threads for the discussion of that (like the ones linked above). Ideally, I envision this thread as more populated by the responses of those with working setups.
Message was edited by: isonoise
Message was edited by: isonoise

Mine works perfect.. This is AFTER a logic board replacement for the 9600's BSOD problem
1) Dell 2007WMP
2) 1680x1050
3) Cable that came with monitor
4) Post repair only really using 9600, though 9400 seemed fine too
5) LG (9C84)
6) Logic board replaced last week for BSOD problem. (That board had external monitor refusing to wake problem as well).
Message was edited by: Robert Derelanko

Happy MBP owners - please post!

Hi all! I've been away from Apple Discussions forum for a while, but am intrigued by the MacBook Pro. It is disconcerting to see all the issues regarding whining and heat - I know there have to be lots of happy owners out there, so would really appreciate hearing from some of you.
Thanks.

Hi Shazza,
I've got a MBP that arrived in early March. And I've got the CPU whine and, since the latest firmware update, heat issues. Yet I'll still post as a happy MBP owner! The machine ROCKS...I've used XP on other laptops, mostly IBM ThinkPads, which are also nice machines, and also Linux. My other laptop is currently an IBM T43 ThinkPad with Fedora Core 5. None of them hold a candle to the Mac's stability, performance (hello, I can listen to iTunes and NOT have it stutter or hiccup when I try to do other things), and overall jam-packed-full-of-features OS and hardware.
I'm currently writing this on my defective MBP in Safari, while checking corp. e-mail in Lotus Notes on Windows XP SP2 using Parallels Workstation beta2, listening to music on iTunes, and I have my password manager (Password Gorilla), a terminal, iCal, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, iChat AV and Mail all running as well. Bluetooth syncs now with my Nokia 9300 Communicator, and I'm working out the modem scripts to use the EDGE capabilities as well for when I can't find WiFi. Keynote and Pages are AWESOME; forget M$ Office.
Go ahead and make your order. You will be pleased.
PS - Apple is sending me a brand new replacement MacBook for this one.
MacBook Pro 1.83 Mac OS X (10.4.5) 1 GB/100 GB HDD 7200 RPM

After having yet another problem with my MacBook Pro and having to wipe the drive, I am now unable to sync my iPhones etc without erasing all the music on them. Is there a way around this? I have no other library!

After having yet another problem with my MacBook Pro and having to wipe the drive, I am now unable to sync my iPhones etc without erasing all the music on them. Is there a way around this? I have no other library!
iTunes is a mess! It couldn't find it's own libraries and I was forced to create a new one. Now I don't know where my music is or if any's missing.

columbus new boy wrote:
How crap is that?
It's not crap at all.
It's not that simple. For example, I've 3500 songs on my MacBook but don't want them all on my phone, so I have to manually select each song again???
There has to be a solution.
Why not simply make a playlist with the songs you want on the iPhone?
and maintain a current backup of your computer.

The circuit of my macbook is dead yet the hard drive is fine. I need to access a file from the hard drive, how can i do this? is there a cable i can connect to another mac that will let me transfer the file?

The circuit of my macbook is dead yet the hard drive is fine. I need to access a file from the hard drive, how can i do this? The mac turns on the screen freezes as bright blue. Is there a cable i can connect to another mac that will let me transfer the file?

There is another option if the Macbook will start up in Target Disk Mode.
Restart the computer while holding down the T key. If you see the firewire symbol moving around on the screen you can connect this one to another one in TDM. You will need a suitable cable to connect the two Macs.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661
Firewire symbol:

Is this yet another problem with 7.5 or is it just me . . .

Upgrade seemed to be fine, at first . . . now I keep getting distortion on songs. It seems to be quite random and just because a song has been distorted when I've listened to it once doesn't mean it will be when I listen to it again! It's driving me insane. Is this yet another bug or have I done something wrong (apart from upgrading to 7.5).

Hi Emlou,
If you have a Windows based operating system such as XP -
It seems to me that you are suffering what I am having the same problem with - the program takes up to much of your computer's processing usage. If you go into your task manager and watch performance as ITunes runs - you will see how much of the total computer usage it is taking at any given moment - that's why your songs are distorted, slowing, garbled, etc - the usage on mine spikes from 11% - 93% AT ANY GIVEN MINUTE! I have no idea why, but I have found that by going to your "Control Panel" and clicking on Quicktime you can adjust audio output to help. Click the audio tab, click Safe Mode Wavout only (checkbox) / Then adjust the "Rate" to 96kHz / Then adjust the "Size" to 16 bit. Close that and shut down and restart Itunes - it might help a little for you.
Maybe someone out there can help us find out why we are suffering with all the CPU usage trouble and how to adjust that spiking.
Thanks!
Paul

Yet another No Service iPhone 4, second hand

Hi all,
Apologies for yet another topic about the No Service issue on the iPhone 4. I bought a secondhand iPhone 4 16GB 2 days ago after having a 3GS 32GB for 18 months with no problems. iPhone 4 was just over a week old when I bought it (warranty date shows when it was first activated), on the O2 UK network like my old one.
All was fine for 2 days, was receiving and making calls and texts etc with no problems. But since late afternoon yesterday the phone has mostly said No Service. It occasionally goes onto O2-UK but with no bars of signal so calls and texts still fail immediately.
I've tried all of the tips I can find online to resolve this, airplane mode on/off, reset network settings, restore from backup, restore as new phone, hard resets. But nothing's working.
I can take out my SIM and put it into my 3GS, in the same location, and get 5 bars of signal, all my texts come through. Then put SIM back into iPhone 4 and straight away, No Service.
I've made a Genius bar appointment for tomorrow afternoon, but I'm wondering what happens regarding the fact that I'm not the person who bought the phone in the first place? Will this be an issue?
Thank you in advance for any advice about this, was so looking forward to having this phone and now, bleh!

I spoke to o2, they checked my SIM is activated and said they don't need a record of my IMEI number. Still saying No Service so will have to see what the "Genius" says tomorrow!

Yet another grey folder thread, help!

Sorry for yet another grey folder thread, but here goes:
Today, earlier, installed Firefox update, along with some addon updates for that program. Quit Firefox and attempt to relaunch, relaunch fails. Reset computer, thinking that will do the trick, I now have grey folder with question mark.
Resolve attempts: reset pram = fail; apple care cd = will not launch/fail; disk utility from original install disks = fail; cannot get repair of disk or permissions to work, continually get error about "failing on exit"; safe mode launch = fail
So, I've done everything, and I've come to conclusion that I am f***, and my HDD is fried (but I hope I am wrong).
So, dear gurus, my question(s)
A) Is my HDD salvageable at all? is there some trick to getting the AppleCare cd to work? Anything?!?!
if not, then B) How can I recover my documents/music/pictures? Long story short, there are several things on there that never had a chance to make my back up schedule, and I desperately want to keep them. Any way to make/copy a disk image to save the docs/imgs, or Firewire them to an external hdd? Do I need to consider a professional HDD rescue?

Looks like a mechanical failure, and Apple won't cover the replacement due to a drop it sustained a year or two ago (the power cable was in, and it fell on the connection point, denting that in, Apple states there is a critical board their and that it would be $950 Tier 3 repair which I can't afford). So I'm going to try a Firewire Migration and a few other things and see if that works. If not, oh well. Thanks everyone for the ideas!

Double up of my document folder If I click on my Documents in finder it then opens another selection of folders including yet another documents folder which if this one is clicked on the folder is repeated yet again this does not appear to be correct help

I believe I have a problem when opening up my documents in finder. where upon I can view all my folders but with yet another Documents folder within this group, if I then click on this second Documents folder yet again a repeat of the do'cs folder appears. I have tried to merge the Documents folders into one but after a morning and a few hours later having completed the merge when I reopened the folders the problem was still there. Help.
Sandra

Reset the PRAM
Reinstall the operating system from the dvd (you will not loose your data)

Yet another major gripe with APE - restricting connection to home network

Yet another serious issue I have with APE is the fact that since very often, the computer just can't see the base station (even when it is located 30 inches from it...) it will just automatically connect to the next available open wifi network, which happens to be my neighbor's... that way I often finding myself surfing someone's else's unsecured network and it's ******* me off.
I tried to delete all wireless networks from system preferences/network/Airport but this does not makes a difference. Any idea on how to restrict my computer to the APE or at least have Mac OS warn me every time before it connects to an unsecured wireless network?
Thanks.

Somewhat easy: I'm assuming you're using Leopard, mainly because I ran through the options from leopard. Other versions of OS X may have slightly different placement or names...
Click on the airport icon in the menu bar.
Choose "Open Network Preferences"
Select "Airport"
There's a checkbox labeled "Ask to join new networks" Make sure it is enabled.
Select "advanced..." (it's a button, lower right)
You can change the connection order by dragging your network to the top of the list.
You can also click on a connection you don't want, then click on the '-' button below it to remove that connection. (and at least the first time, the computer will ask you if you want to connect)
You can go a step futher, by de-selecting the checkbox labeled "Remember any network this computer has joined" That way it won't add anything to your list of 'remembered' networks.
Message was edited by: pariah0

Display hints, custom format method in VO, is there yet another way?

Did you experience the same and had a solution?
Hi,
I am using JDeveloper 10.1.3.4 and looking for yet another way of customizing the display of an attribute of a view object.
I have two tables: BILL and AWARDS, with composite foreign key relationship (on the LDAP_UID and TERM fields) between them, as illustrated below.
The BILL table:
NAME       LDAP_UID    TERM   CREDIT_HRS
Tom Smith tom.simth   200902       12.5
Jane Lopez jane.lopez 200906        4.0
The AWARD table:
LDAP_UID    TERM SOURCE     APPLIED
tom.smith 200902 Perkins     2000.00
tom.smith 200906 Direct      1300.00
jane.lopez 200906 CN           500.00 At the business data model level, this is master(Bill)/detail(Awards) relationship. Bill is dragged from the data control palette to the page and displayed as a form, and Awards is dragged to the page as a table. When tom.smith logs in and chooses the 200902 TERM, the master and detail are joined on tom.smith=tom.smith and 200902=200902, so the $2,000.00 of Perkins loan is retrieved for him:
Name Tom Smith
Term 200902
Source    Applied
Perkins   $2,000.00That works fine but not user friendly: the values in the TERMS column are a bit cryptic and need to be displayed in plain English, i.e., 200902 should be displayed as "Spring 2009" and 200906 as "Summer 2009". The display hints in the VO can not handle this. The only other way I know is writing a method in the Row class of the VO to do the translation. And this is the result:
Name Tom Smith
Term Spring 2009
Source        Applied
No rows yet   Obviously, "Spring 2009" is used not only for display, but also for joining the master and detail tables. Of course "Spring 2009"!=200902, therefore no detail is retrieved for the user.
Question is: is there yet another way to customize the display, that does not affect the join of master and detail tables?
Many thanks for your help!
Newman

Hi, Chris,
That works!
I found the chapter where transient attribute is explained and an example is given creating a transient attribute in the entity object. It turned out that transient attribute works both in entity object and view object. I did it in the VO and it solves my problem.
I spent hours of time before posting that question, trying two different ways but neither worked. Your one sentence saved me a lot of time. I do appreciate you help very much!
Truly,
Newman

HT4191 why do you need yet another email address to sync notes

Is there a way to sync ipad notes with an imac desktop without opening up yet another unwanted "email" address? Why do compaines constantly demand that you open up email addresses through all of them?

Notes are very special, their sync is done by IMAP(mail) server that syncs our emails. In order to sync notes you "have to" be connected to that IMAP and mail account is "your connection". BTW mail "ON" button will not sync your emails - it only syncs email settings between devices, like server rules, blocked servers, etc. It will not reflect on other icloud stuff, but what it will do is move your notes sync from current sync ( if one exsits) to different. For example you notes currently can be local (on my phone), Yahoo or exchange like google. (you can check that by going to settings - mail contacts and calendars- and under your mail accounts you will see small "contacts" "calendars" and if you will see "notes" that would be your current syncing IMAP.

Yet Another Soon to be MBP Owner in Need of Guidence

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