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Macbook Pro 2,2 w/ Merom


mmk
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Hi all,

 

I just received my C2D MBP and I submit here some of my opinions if you there undecided guys need them :) and also some questions for the other MBP users out there.

 

1) HEAT -- Don't know about the first generation, but the C2D MBP is fine. It runs pretty cool, I have no problems using it on my lap (on bare skin). It's hotter than my previuous pentium m 1.4ghz thinkpad (which barely used its vents) but it's fine... way cooler than a 1.5ghz acer centrino. The hottest area I found to be is the left speaker, where I belive (from the pictures w/ the notebook internals) the wireless card is located.

 

2) NOISE -- It's silent. No more silent than my old thinkpad (maybe because the thinkpad did not used the vents almost at all), but, again, more silent than the acer :) The noise depends on the heat :) the more heat, vents go faster and noisier. No HDD noise or anything else.

 

3) MATTE vs GLOSSY -- I went for MATTE even though it had bigger wait times in the online store, It's GREAT!

 

4) OTHERS -- I had no dead pixels, no other screen problems, no other problem :) The power brick is not such a brick. I expected something huge based on what the 1st gen macbook pro owners said (complained), but the size is ok. Didn't touch it to see how hot it is though.

 

4) GAP -- the only flaw I found is that the new MBP (and the old one also I read) does not fully close. You have a small gap (bigger on the left that on the right) so I feel impared (fear not to press the screen against the keyboard maybe) to grab it when the lid is closed from the front area.

 

OTHER IMPRESSIONS/QUESTIONS

 

- I got scared the first time I connected the magsafe :) The thing was literally sucked out of my hands.

 

- I also got scared when the vents were at full speed. The sound was like a plane warming the engines, preparing to take off :) I want to ask other mac users if they experienced that... or is it just mine that does that. (After it got cooler the plane landed and stopped the engines :P)

 

- I also want to ask about the sleep led. When I put my mac to sleep, the led goes white. When I close the lid, the led starts to blink slowly. This also happens when I just close the lid and the computer goes automatically to sleep. What do you say guys? Does your led blinks when the lid is closed ?

 

- For those that had doubts: HIBERNATION (SAFE SLEEP) WORKS. I had only one warning when the battery was like 5% (You should connect the power cord or smthg), and then it shut off (~1%). When I powered it on again, it continued from where I was, but it started slower and with the little bars specific to safe sleep.

 

- When it goes out of sleep, the DVDROM tries to read a CD. The noise is pretty loud. Actually the DVD Drive is pretty loud. What say you ?

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I've more or less decided to buy one as soon as student verification is done. I hope the people running hacks misses out on something or everyone on Leopard just because I hate when people say "omg my hackintosh PC was so much better value than the Mac, because I stole the software!!".

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One more thing:

Is it possible for a small metal thing (a pin, a wire) to be attracted by the magsafe through the big ventholes inside the laptop?! Can anyone test the magnetic field near the ventholes ?

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Congrats as first :) mmh about the display: I ordered the glossy one, could you give us more info about the matte? What's about the contrast? It's better than SONY or Toshiba technologies?

 

 

 

Thanks!

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Well I want to add my 2 cents to this. The laptop is much cooler than I expected when running in OSX. Now I pimarilly use Windows Vista on it though and as long as you don't block the vents the laptop does bit a bit toastier but not too terribly bad. The Matte screen is wonderful. I've been using a glossy screen for about 3 years now on prior notebooks but was wanting the machine too much to wait for the glossy versions to get into the store so I grabbed what they had after scouring the Wash DC area stores for 2 days looking for a location that still had some in stock. I have to day I never realized just how much glare I was getting till I got this laptop. Much easier on the eyes. Yes Glossy will get you a better color contrast but I think the benifits outweigh the diff. No you won't be able to use mini CDs with the superdrive. The Magsafe connector doesn't seem to be too terribly strong on other metal objects so I wouldn't worry too much.

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Yes, matte is nice :)

I installed CoreDuoTemp and I get idle temps smaller than 50C (45-48) and under normal workload (surfing wireless, itunes, iphoto) 50-55C.

I also ran it on battery with no power management at all (proc always at 2.16Ghz, 50% brightness, frontrow running an iphoto slideshow with music, wireless on, btooth off) and I got 2.5 hours.

With power management I get 3.5 hours of medium work. Probably the time can be streched to 4 hours.

 

I want to ask though about the vents. It's pretty warm in my house (pretty warm the weather outside too...) but the fans kick in even when CoreDuoTemp shows 55C. They kick in really hard :) like the engine of a plane. This thing happens to you too ?

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Could you please run http://www.barefeats.com/kak4c.html and compare your results? Preferably I would like someone with 128MB gfx mem do that against someone with 256MB... But a test for 128MB only on the 15.4" in case the 17" got a higher clocked one would do fine.

 

Best case is probably 128MB 15.4" vs 256MB 15.4" vs 256MB 17".

 

Pretty please :poster_oops:

 

Edit: If you wanna do me that favour, please talk to eachother over something and decide what game, resolutions and so on in case you don't have quake4 available.. Or PM me or something.

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Also can someone tell me what brand the original memorysticks are, what modell if possible, what chips and how many.

 

I don't know if I shall get 1GB more from apple store or from a regular on, the price difference between apples and say crucial or whatever komplett.se had wasn't worth the extra work, but you can get twinmos memory modules cheaper but I don't know if those are ok aswell and if I need to replace both I will have to spend even more money than letting Apple replace it, thought I can sell the original one.

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Doooh, I need to know if 128 vs 256MB ram matters a lot (as much as I need to get 256MB, stupid Apple always doing this with their {censored}.)

 

Also someone said it was only the 17" which didn't had underclocked X1600, please type your gpu speeds =P

 

Never mind, the guy in the later review had the 15.4" and his runs faster, I had seen the review earlier but didn't thought about it.

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I just have my MBP C2D with educational discount, more than a grand off.

 

It doesn't give much heat, as soon as have it sit on a marble desk, worked for an hour, the second you pick it up, the whole case is COOL! incredible. The hottest part is below the left speaker.

 

I could hardly hear any noise from the vent or else where when I sit in working position, thanks to the vent which open at the rear, bottom of the screen, most noise just blocked by the screen and won't go directly into your ears. clever design.

 

I went for a matte as well, I did some research, matte cost more than glossy, they have a different structure, glossy screen gives high contrast, but it couldn't display the correct color temperature. matte have reliable color, but dull( I guess that is why there is no glossy cinema display?)

 

 

 

So Far, I have got few questions to it, wish anyone could give a little help.

 

Hell I got a "potentially" bright-dead(white) pixel, I could turn it dead or alive by touching it on the screen. Does it within the unlimited warranty in the first 90 days given by apple??

 

The first time I play with the luminance keyboard in completely dark room, the keyboard was having a bright ( near eye irritate) white light from the LED embedded. After I did some program installation, the other day I play in the dark room again, all the LED just got a lot dimmer, (eye-comfort) but the brightness from the LCD could already light up the keyboard, the luminate keyboard seems not much fun now. anything wrong with my LED? or it is just normal (not normal first time?) ?

 

I read from apple, it said suggesting user a battery calibration for the first time and few months ever after. MBP is on the list ,

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284

Is it compulsary? I wasn't told to do so in the manual, I afraid to miss any of these hidden-must-see articles.

 

By the way I feel happy with the battery, I have aperture and logic express running, the battery says 2:30 hrs, but actually I got more than that, 3 hrs. ( of coz I dun really processing RAW and playing AIFF simutaneously).

 

Sorry for my poor english, I am from Hong Kong.

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I have had the C2D MBP (see my signatire) since Thursday.

I have a glossy display - and it is absolutely amazing - - I have a big window behind me right now and there is no glare - - - the only time I see a glare is when the machine is off.

This is the most amazing computer I've ever had....

 

With the lid closed, there is a little bigger gap on the right side than the left side - - I don't think it makes any difference, though.

Other than that, everything else was perfect... no dead pixels or anything like that.

It also has the Hitachi hard drive that uses perpendicular recording.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/rec...rAnimation.html

 

I don't know if they are all shipping with the Hitachi drive or not - or whether or not it as good as they try to make it sound.

So far, though, there have been no problems at all...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

So, I broke down and ordered one -- MBP 15" 2.33 with 200 Gb drive, 3 Gb RAM. This is replacing my slightly older MBP 2.0 which just went up on ebay.

 

So to promote selling my old one, I added a video on youtube of HL Episode 1 under Crossover, along with how fast parallels desktop is. We'll see.

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...E:IT&ih=019

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In my opinion the MBP CéD can get "pretty" noisy, too. Maybe it's just mine, but when the CPU load is high the fan is turning up and it's not so quite. I won't start complaining here, because I never heard the whining MBP in reality, so I hope it's just a paranoia of mine. ;-)

The biggest problem I have with my one-week-old MBP C2D is the iSight which won't work anymore as well as when shutting it down it "freezes" on the shutdown screen with the wheel (which suddenly stops turning) ant then I have to power it off manually.

I hope, these are only software issues which will be solved with an OS X update, anyway these problems are bothering me.

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I just have my MBP C2D with educational discount, more than a grand off.

 

Which education discount did you use and which model did you buy? My college student discount shows MBP prices at $1,799/$2,299/$2,599, respectively, so I'm interested in seeing how you managed a larger percent off.

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