Mac convert, day 2

This morning, I put the laptop into sleep before the commute. At work, I opened the lid, and the mouse pointer was hanging there with nothing - no dialog box to unlock screen, no progress bar, nothing, nada. *sigh*

I brought it to our tech support, and we ended up force shutoff again. This is bad. Very bad.

He updated the system to the latest. I hope it will fix the instability, but I'll have to see. I'm willing to give MBP some chance but it's not looking very good so far.

Another new downer: the edge of the unibody is just too sharp - it hurts my arm/wrist/palm occasionally. I hope this is something I can get used to, but clearly this little box is designed for better look than better tactile comfort (same for the Aluminum surface - it's not as comfortable to the touch as the hard plastic shell of Thinkpad).

I also found why big touchpad gets in the way - if I put my palm down from the normal typing position, the parts of my palms touch the upper corners of the touchpad. And then if I try to tap using right thumb, my left palm is still touching the upper left corner, making it a secondary click. So I have to consciously move my hands slightly apart (or rather, rotate slightly outward).

A few things I found out that helps me a bit: command-left/right are home/end, and option-left/right are move-word-left/right. Also command-up/down are page up/down. So at least I got my basic keyboard navigation back. But I still don't know how to move between tabs in Firefox or Chrome through keyboard shortcut...guess I'll have to search for it :)

Not everything's gloom and doom though. A few good things I can say about MBP:

It's fast. And having 4GB of memory is awesome. There's just no comparison how much more responsive the machine is - especially when I'm working full blast and have multiple browsers open with lots of tabs with lots of graphs, there's no "swapping" that used to make the performance suck on my poor T43p with only 1GB of memory. It also wakes up fast (of course, *if* it wakes up, that is) - from a regular sleep, it's quite fast to wake up. Not "instantaneous" but nearly so.

Also, it is silent - I haven't noticed any fan noise or hard disk seek sounds so far. I can vaguely hear it if I pay attention to it in a silent room, and it just is plain silent with normal ambient noise around me. Moving it around a few times today, I think I can hear small clicking noise, typically when the disk puts its head somewhere "safe" - I suspect the machine detects my lifting it up and moves the disk head somewhere safe, but I could be wrong.

Compared to T43p, the machine is less hot. It's probably because most of my daily tasks (lots of browser windows/tabs, and one terminal, and a few Finder windows, and a chat client) are not taxing its cpu much, but still the bottom becomes a bit warm during usage and that's it. I don't feel uncomfortable at all, and there's no hot air blowing out to the side either.