Podcaster Tom Raftery gets a new Sony Vaio laptop with Vista to test out direct from Microsoft. So far things don’t look promising.
“Upgrading would appear to be the issue here as well – the sticker on the underside of the laptop is an XP sticker. It appears this laptop was upgraded to Vista and not all the drivers are ready.
The above error occurred after less than 10 minutes of using the laptop and re-occurred 3 more times in the next half an hour. Oh dear!”
In other news, last night I turned on my custom built high-end ACMA Windows machine to do some photo editing. Now it was the first time I’ve used this Windows machine in about a month but it would not boot initially. I think the reason why it wouldn’t boot was because a USB hard drive was connected to the machine and it was turned off. Seems like a stupid reason not to boot though. After I unplugged all of the USB devices it booted ok. Then I had to replug all of the USB devices back in after booting. Reminded me why I loved my Mac.
Still, the Mac is not error free — and while I get about one error on the Mac per 30 I’d get on the PC to be fair it is worth pointing out the errors on the Mac when I get them.
I have noticed one bug on my Mac recently. It seems like when I’m using Adobe’s Bridge software and connected over my home network drive and *then* close the lid and put the Mac to sleep, if I unplug my ethernet connection and then re-open the Mac Bridge sometimes hangs. What’s worse it won’t quit with “force quit” from either Bridge or the Finder.
I wish there was a way to actually kill the process that is keeping Bridge running so that I can restart it.
Hey Thomas… there *IS* a way in the UNIX terminal to ‘kill’ the Bridge process.
Open up terminal
Type ‘ps x’ (without the apostrophes)
Note in the column which PID# belongs to the Bridge
Type ‘kill ####’ (where #### equals the process number noted above)
Quit terminal and Bridge will have been quit for you.
Thomas, aside from the aforementioned terminal way, there’s another way that’s worked for me with pesky programs.
Open up Applications:Utilities:Activty Monitor
Find the process and kill it. This usually does the trick for me.
Shane’s way is a little more kosher and less likely to result in killing the wrong proc. I’m learning to like the terminal and gravitating away from the gui from some goofball reason…
He wins. Same result. Easier method.
Thanks Shane and Gerald. Learning new things about the Mac every day!
Tom
Sweet, Shane-1, Gerald-0.
Thomas, I’ve been using my MacBook Pro (which I got through an online program from Nuitech for about $500 total) as my primary computer for just about three months now, and I love it. I despise having to use a PC for anything unless it’s out of convenience. I’ve been able to do everything on my Mac that I could on my PC (except use my Cisco ‘iPhone’ with Skype, which is no problem now that I have a cell). But as an aspiring photographer, my Mac is perfectly suited.
Glad I could be of some assistance!