mac posts page 2

My New Computer

I had never owned a Windows or X86 computer (though I did borrow one from school for a number of months), yet it is very important, as a web developer, to test in IE. IE is of course discontinued for Mac, and has been for 10 years or something like that. IE happens to be the hardest browser to develop for, especially the dreaded IE6, and it (IE in general) still has the market share, so it is very important to test for. I recently got a job and some actual income, so I decided to buy something.

I’ve been considering getting a netbook for a while now to fill my IE needs. It would be relatively cheap, and would be awesome to have a tiny computer to easily carry around. I carry my iBook around a lot, but it’s big and heavy and I have to think if I really want it. The netbook I’d not really have to worry about so much.

I did a lot of research and looking into netbooks. I wanted a touchscreen one with good handwriting recognition, but the current attempts aren’t fully to my satisfaction. There are some new models expected to come out at some point, who knows when. So I could buy a cheap one use it for a reasonable amount of time, when better touchscreen netbooks are out, sell my cheap netbook. I’ve never really been a fan of frequent computer purchases, but I could try it. I could also buy one of the current touchscreen ones and hope it’s good enough for my needs.

At my job, though, I use a mac with Windows installed virtually with Parallels. It provides a fairly good workflow for testing, since I can test many browsers and code all on the same computer. There are a few issues, but for the most part I’ve liked it. So I got to thinking that I could perhaps upgrade my main computer rather than get an extra one. I could get a Macbook and Parallels and Windows. That would be pricy, but I’d have a much more powerful computer, only one to deal with, and possibly better workflow.

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iBook Audio Issue

After running the utility Onyx on my computer to both clean it up a bit and change some settings, I suddenly found my computer having some troubles.  Dialog boxes would just beachball shortly after appearing, and the applications that created them would have to be force quit.  After trying to change my volume, I noticed that something was wrong with my audio, so I turned off the text-to-speech I had set up for dialog boxes.  After this, the beachball problem stopped.

But I had no audio at all.  On further investigation, I noticed the OS was not recognizing any audio devices, input or output.  I found a forum thread discussing this issue.  I couldn’t find the cause, but I did find a solution.  I simply had to download Quicktime from Apple and reinstall it over my current install.  Since then, I have full audio and no problems with it, and no unusual beachballing.

I’m not sure what happened that caused this problem, but it might have been related to the permissions check Onyx does on loading.  I hope to avoid it in the future.  I will be more careful using Onyx in the future anyway.