The 23-second boot

Review of the 15" 2.3 Ghz MacBook Pro

The 2011 Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros are outstanding in more ways than one! I have been testing one for several days now and I must say that this computer has exceeded my expectations. This computer has replaced my 15" Alienware 1.6Ghz Core i7 processor. I’m not going to run a bunch of diagnostics comparing every minutia of detail between applications. There are plenty of other MBP reviews that do that. Instead I want to give my report on how this machine is used and made a difference in my everyday work!

Before I even had the MBP I ordered 8GB of RAM from OWC (http://www.macsales.com) and a 115GB Mercury Pro Extreme SSD. I booted the MBP made sure that the memory worked then promptly shut it down and installed the 8GB of RAM and SSD. Approximately 5 minutes later I was installing OS X from the restore CD. The OS installed in about 20 minutes. Next I installed iLife from the Applications CD, this took a bit longer (approximately 25 minutes). Installed Office 2011, Fusion 3 and Starcraft II after that!

Boot time

The system boots into OS X in 23-seconds! Very fast read and write times overall, Word, Excel and Powerpoint loads almost instantly. Outlook takes a second or two longer but performance with MS Office has blown me away!

Boot camp

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate in about 15 minutes, patches took considerably longer! I only gave the boot camp partition 32GB since I only have 115GB to work with! Perhaps I will redo this later once I can afford a 240GB SSD! After loading a lot of patches, optimizing Windows for my SSD (like removing paging file, disabling defragmentation, disabling hibernation, etc.) and taking a Windows Experience Index check I was ready to test the Windows 7 boot time. NOTE: At this point my boot loader is set to boot from the BOOPCAMP partition and auto login is enabled. Windows 7 Ultimate boots in 32 seconds (considerably longer than OS X). Interestingly enough the Alienware boots in about the same time with the same SSD!

Battery Life

So far I have fully charged and discharged the battery about three times and have run the following tests.

•       Full wifi, Bluetooth, and high performance settings – 3 hour battery life
•       Full wifi, Bluetooth, and default battery settings – 5 hour battery life
•       Full wifi, Bluetooth, and high performance settings (installing apps) – 2 hour battery life

I intend to run several more tests with real world applications, will report back here later. 

Update on Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 11:45PM by David G (Chuzpah)

UPDATE: After using the computer for more than a week I timed the boot process again and I'm getting consistant 16 second boot times! I highly recommend the OWC Mercury Pro SSD drives over the Intel X25-M SSD that I had before! 

My Samsung Focus expereince and review

Why I got rid of my iPhone!

A couple of years ago I purchased an iPhone 3G and thought it was the best phone ever! I loved the Apps and user interface; I also liked the fact that I could sync all of my contacts from my Mac Pro to my iPhone. I could surf the web, view documents and read my Kindle books. Life was good until that fateful day in June 2010! ---That day changed my mobile life and satisfaction with the Apple iPhone forever! In June 2010 Apple released iOS 4.01 (which I immediately upgraded without a second thought). Until now I had absolutely no reason to suspect that my phone would turn into such a mess.

After about an hour of downloading and installing the update my phone rebooted and I was eager to try the new features such as iBooks. That is when I noticed that everything was so slow! Apps that had previously worked crashed despite being certified with version 4.01, iBooks took over 2 minutes to launch, the keyboard had so much lag at times my words would suddenly show up all at once, etc. The list of problems seemed unless.

After dealing with these problems for months I started looking at my upgrade options. Normally I would have just purchased an iPhone 4 and have put my iPhone 3G on Craigslist or eBay. Around this time the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 was on the horizon and I was interested, very interested! I signed up for a Backstage pass and kept track of the progress of the new phone. In late December my Outlook reminder telling me that my upgrade availability was ready! I waited to until after the holidays to upgrade. I was on the fence about upgrading to either the iPhone 4 or Windows phone for several weeks. Then in early February 2011 I decided that the wait was over! I decided to bite the bullet and leap headlong into getting a Windows Phone 7!

Samsung Focus Experience:

I have to admit I was very skeptical about switching to the Windows Phone 7 but now I’m glad I did! The first thing I made sure of was that my unlimited data plan would be active on the new phone. The first thing I noticed when I turned on the phone was how fast it was to boot up, the Samsung Focus booted 50 seconds quicker than the iPhone 3G (which is impressive). I also do not notice any lag at all with the Focus, I have one more e-mail account configured on the Windows Phone (Hotmail). Switching through Apps and content is so much faster on the Focus even when fully loaded! Also the Super AMOLED screen is gorgeous and much nicer to look at compared to the iPhone 3G, I’m sure the iPhone 4 is on par with it! Facebook integration is flawless and I find that I rarely use the Facebook app because my social network updates are in the people App. 

Another nice feature is that I can replace the battery myself; I do not need to take the phone into a store and pay nearly $100 to get that done. Supposedly I can expand the storage capacity on the Focus but it is not fully supported yet, at least not according to Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/12/atandt-tells-samsung-focus-customers-not-to-buy-microsd-cards-yet/). Another cool (or not so cool) feature is the font size on the Windows phone is huge! My wife likes it but I do not! I’m still trying to find a setting that controls the font size but it is a minor inconvenience. I was able to copy most of my iTunes+ music from iTunes over to my Windows machine and import it into Zune without incident. I have no way to transfer the TV Shows and Movies to the Windows phone but that doesn’t matter to me as long as I have an iPad. Viewing video content on 4” screens is not an ideal experience anyway! If I do feel the need to view video content on the device I can always use the Netflix App anyway.

Apps:

For the most part I have been able to find about 90% of all the Apps I used for the iPhone in the Windows Marketplace.  I found Kindle, WeatherBug, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Flixster, Fandango, Twitter and You Tube without trouble. My news Apps are missing but there are 3^rd party alternatives that I plan to try out. The Apps I cannot find I will run on the iPad until a suitable replacement will be found. The Apps that I cannot run on the Focus that I care about are as follows.

Sirius Radio – I can run this App on the iPad but I will miss it when I’m driving around in rental cars.

American Airlines – I e-mailed AA and got a very fast response stating that they are looking at supporting other mobile platforms, right now the only other mobile platform they support besides the iPhone is Android.

Nook – I guess I will not be reading any of my Nook books on the go! I have this on the iPad so it is not as much of a worry but it is since catching up on a book while waiting for the dentist or in line at the post office. I can always purchase more Kindle books in the mean time!

Amazon Shopping Cart – I heard an announcement that it would be on this phone but it is not available in the Marketplace yet!

HULU Plus – I will definitely miss listening to Fora.TV when I’m in the car! When I’m watching content I’m doing it with the iPad anyway!

Dragon Dictation – Not that this is very accurate in the first place but I do miss the functionality when I’m walking or otherwise cannot type on the keyboard. 

After almost a week of using the Focus I’m very satisfied that I switched. There is functionality that I like on the iPhone better, namely how the phone contact lists are managed but I can live with these for the greater good of having a faster smartphone!

Welcome to Chuzpah's Technical World

Welcome to the new and improved Chuzpah.Com

I've moved my Blog and Web content from GoDaddy to Squarespace! I will be migrating all of my technical product reviews and blog entries as time allows. Please feel free to browse and I welcome all comments.

Enjoy!

David G (Chuzpah)

Update on Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 6:54PM by David G (Chuzpah)

Here is my Review of the Dell Streak, first published in September, 2010.

Overview:

I have used the device a lot in the past 10 days and I like the idea of having a mini-tablet device and phone rolled into one package. The screen is really nice! I rarely hold my phone to my ear so the size was not a big problem for me. I was up and running with the device in a few minutes. The device responds much more quickly than the iPhone 3G with OS 4.1! I installed 20 apps from the Android marketplace in only a few minutes over a 3G connection!

Usage:

The biggest trouble I had was aligning the back cover evenly, the cover popped out continuously during setup, after playing around with it for several minutes I finally got the hang of it! I have used the device to read eBooks with the Kindle and Nook Android apps and both work great. The nook has a nice page turning feature similar to the iBooks application on my iPhone. I have also taken several pictures and some video and that also works well. I found that taking pictures with good light is key; the photos come out well with natural light but seem lacking in an indoor setting. Since the Streak comes with a forward facing camera I plan to use it for video chats, etc. However, as of this writing I’m unable to find a good video chat application. I have also used the device’s GPS and navigation capabilities and found the associated Google navigation applications to be extremely helpful. Now I’m tempted to buy a car kit!

So far I have not had a single dropped call with the device. Since the SIM card that came with the Streak is not associated with my primary phone number I plan to use the SIM card in my iPhone in the device for a while to better measure it dropped call ratio compared with the iPhone 3G. I will report back on that later!


Media:

I have used the phone with both 3G and wifi and I have had great results, I particularly like the built-in navigation GPS. The biggest problem I have had is porting my iTunes library to the device, I have been making MP3 DVDs then copying the music manually to the device. The Streak will not play .MOV files, so far that is the biggest drawback. More pros of the device are the user changeable battery and memory! It is nice not having to pay someone $100 to change out a battery! Overall the battery life is good but not great. I find that I can usually make it through a typical day before the battery dies, however, if I have a lot of phone calls and surf the web frequently the battery will need to be recharged before the evening. Also flash is not completely working for all websites! The only real con is the proprietary cable! If I lose the cable I need to send away for a replacement, I cannot just walk into a store in an airport and purchase another one! Other than that I'm hard pressed to find any additional problems or concerns with the device. On the software side it would be very nice to have Netflix and Hulu+, can't wait for Android 2.2 for even better flash support!

Final Thoughts:

After using the device for almost two weeks I must say I’m impressed with the overall quality of the Streak in general. My only complaints are the back cover design, propriety charging cable and lack of good streaming applications like Netflix and Hulu Plus. Full Flash support is also not present! 90% of the applications that I use on a daily basis on my iPhone are available on Android as well. Dell keep up the good work and I look forward to seeing future tablet offerings as well.