Hi all, picked up our new MBA a couple of days ago, and thought people might be interested in first impressions. I¹ve really been hanging out for a lighter MacBook as I find them too heavy to carry in a case or my backpack. We are going to China in a couple of months, and we particularly wanted a travel laptop.
Its the 1.6 80gig model, so the first difficulty was getting everything from the MacBook Pro onto it. In the end, decided to freshly install only the necessary programs, and not transfer over my user data. This results in a fairly lean and clean setup, although I am gradually adding to the program set. To please Stephen, there is a 10gig Bootcamp partition with XP professional. Because of the relative slowness of the machine, I decided not to share resources using Parallels or Fusion. XP appears to be fast and stable, running Office 2000. The MBA feels both solid and delicate at the same time, the keyboard, for example, feels robust and has a good feel for a touch typist like myself. It feels delicate when you pick it up, or carry it around with the lid closed or open. The screen is very crisp and clear, as you would expect. Programs I¹ll be using are Office 2008, Adobe CS3, Aperture and possibly iMovie 08. Office appears to be as fast as on my iMac, I wouldn¹t expect to be able to use the other programs at a power¹ level. I did try transferring data using an ethernet adaptor it was probably only as slow as it usually is. For other programs, I¹ve used a portable DVD writer (liteon), which works using just the USB port, but I then attached the power cord as I wanted to make sure things didn¹t stop in the middle. I had to do a reinstall of the system after my attempt at transferring user data, and found that the install stalled once, but worked the next time. The packaging is very nice, makes it seem a very special machine as you unpack. There was no manila envelope!! The dongles for the DVI and VGA out are small and light seem a little fragile. The power pack is smaller as well. We are very happy with this little machine. Daniel got this one in for us, and may be able to do a demo if you are interested. Cheers, Susan. -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
