I couldn’t help it. Seriously. It was either a refurbished previous-generation 2.4GHz MacBook Pro or a similar model on clearance.

In the end, my education discount won and I got this Penryn-based 2.4GHz 15″ MacBook Pro with a hard disk upgrade (250GB instead of 200GB). And it came with Leopard!

The one thing I have always liked about the Macs was the ease of transitioning to a new machine. When Apple was undergoing its darkest days pre-Jobs2 and early-Jobs2, the only going for it was the legion of fans who were upgrading from one generation of Macs to another.

So it is to be expected that this ease of upgrading is one of the best features of Mac ownership.

All you have to do is to connect your old Mac to the new Mac using a Firewire cable. Then power on the new Mac. When prompted to transfer data from the old Mac, power that on and hold the T key.

Transferring 80GB of data from my 2.16GHz MacBook took nearly two hours.

Yes. That was a long time without using a computer.

The one thing that really upset me was that the MacBook Pro was going to sleep during the transfer!!! So I could not go out to Starbucks for a coffee. Instead, I had to wait around and move the mouse once in awhile to keep the MacBook Pro awake.

The nice thing about the transfer process is that it brings over all the user accounts, user data/documents, user settings, applications, application settings, network settings, system settings etc etc.

When the transfer is done, you basically find your old environment on the new Mac.

The other problem I found was the major slowdown when using the new MacBook Pro for the first time. There are several reasons for this, including the need for Spotlight to index all the new stuff on the hard disk.

This, unfortunately, creates a bad first impression. When you fork out mucho $$$ for a new MacBook Pro, you have the expectation that you’ll be behind the steering wheel of a Ferrari. Instead, applications take forever to start up and usability ranges from sluggish to unusable.

Apple should have set it up such that Spotlight and all the other background tasks are spread out over a longer period of time. At the least, these tasks should be deferred to start at a later time. This would give the new owner a better first-use experience.

I also found out that some email settings were not transferred over e.g. SMTP server settings if you had different email accounts.

I upgraded the MacBook Pro to 4GB of RAM with a kit from ADATA in order to optimize my Parallels experience.  This was not to be! Parallels refused to start after the upgrade. It had run with the 2GB of RAM the MacBook Pro had shipped with. I ended up re-installing Parallels.

The other software  that had problems with the memory upgrade was Yahoo! Messenger. Again, I had to re-install.

Other than these few problems, my experience has been good. But I didn’t get a “wow” using the MacBook Pro compared to my MacBook. Maybe I’m jaded.

I like the larger screen. There is definitely more real estate for applications and stuff. I also found that I type better with the MacBook Pro keyboard than with the MacBook one: I made fewer mistakes etc.

Summary of Problems:

a. MacBook Pro going into sleep mode during transfer

b. Major slow down when first using the MacBook Pro

c. Not all email settings were transferred over

d. Parallels, Yahoo! Messenger had problems with 4GB upgrade

We had Asa Dotzler from Mozilla come into class last night to look the presentations on how to spread Firefox virally.

I noticed that he was using a MacBook Pro and asked him if he found Firefox slower than Safari.

His response was: “Try out Firefox 3 Beta 4″.

I did the moment I got home and am blown away!

My main complaint about Firefox in the past was that it felt like a big fat chunk of code. It was slow to start up (compared to Safari) and just didn’t feel very smooth.

The new Firefox 3 starts up very very quickly (faster than Safari) and the user interface objects (buttons and icons) were very Mac-like.

I have just imported all my Safari bookmarks into Firefox and will use it over the next few days to see if it should become my default browser.

Asa did mention last night that the functional differences between the various browsers are getting fewer. For example, previously Google Docs would complain about a Safari browser. Recently, I found that Safari now works with Google Docs. So there is less of a rational for switching browsers at the functional, web page rendering level. Instead, market share expansion will probably come as a result of performance improvements and branding (being cool using Firefox vs being passe using IE).

In my other role as the Haas EWMBA Student Association’s Communications Committee co-chair, I help to administer a set of blogs that are hosted on blogger.com (aka blogspot).

Instead of forcing people to use special tools or (heaven forbid) HTML to create web content, we decided to use blogs. This is because blogs are targeted at average people(bloggers) who are more interested in creating content than programming in HTML.

This means that the main Haas EWMBAA webpage is a single blog. All the individual webpages of the various committees are individual blogs with different URLs e.g. “http://haasewmbaa-communications.blogspot.com/” which is the blog page for the Communications Committee.

If we had done it the traditional way, we would have had to teach people Microsoft Publisher and set up FTP accounts and all the rest of the good stuff. The advantage of that would have been a more consistent set of URLs e.g. www.haasewmbaa.com/communications

The downside would have been less content.

With that background out of the way, I have to say that setting up a blog with blogger.com is much easier than with WordPress.

For one, it is easy to set up the content on the right margins. Within minutes, I was putting up pictures of the communications committee members, pictures of Haas, links etc.

WordPress, strangely, requires you to edit HTML if you wanted to change the general look and feel of the blog.

So if you are wondering why there is no picture of the Silicon Valley Geek…