The Best NoteBook

Tom Yagerof InfoWorld is all praises for the new 15″ MacBook Pro. Well almost all praises. There are some minor flaws in an otherwise great notebook.


The 15-inch MacBook Pro is the best of the tier-one commercial notebooks, full stop. My two complaints — that the SD card sticks out of its slot and the USB ports remain too close together — are overshadowed by the new display, seven-hour battery, faster CPU, and the fact that there is an SD card slot. There are cheaper notebooks, but I’d challenge you to find one that’s faster, quieter, and better built than MacBook Pro.



I have personally been using the first gen of the 15″ Unibody MacBook Pros and apart from the battery life I’m quite happy with it. It’s truly one of the best built laptops I’ve owned. With the new models, my battery complaints have most likely been answered.

I honestly think that the MacBook Pro is quite possibly the best notebook around, be it PC or Mac. Sure there are faster, more powerful notebooks. Alienware comes to mind but non as refined and well rounded as the MacBook Pro. It simply looks and performs well.






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IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome Processor Overhead

After speaking with a friend of mine and seeing him use Chrome, I decided to give it another try. The reason I stopped using it before is because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t work with my Google toolbar and import all my favorites to be used.



Combine the lack of Google Toolbar support, along with missing a number of my Firefox extensions I’ve become dependent on and I just couldn’t make the full switch.

My friend said he felt the same way, but forced himself to use it for awhile and see if he could be productive without the extensions. He decided the speed increases in the browser were worth the lack of extensions. He still has Firefox installed on his machine, but it’s not his default browser. He uses Firefox when he needs to use one of his extensions.

I’m not sure I notice a huge speed increase on most sites, but as to be expected, Google sites do load significantly faster in my opinion. What I started to become more curious about was which browser had less of a processor footprint on the machine while running.

I decided to open the same page in each browser and then take a look at the memory and CPU usage for each in Windows Task Manager. Here are the results:

  • Firefox 3.0: 04 CPU / 181,020 K Memory
  • Internet Explorer 8: 00 CPU / 85,080 K Memory
  • Google Chrome: 00 CPU / 27,300 K Memory

The results weren’t really shocking. I expected Firefox to be heavy because of all the extensions I’m using. Chrome would be light because there’s nothing running but the browser itself. IE8 sits in the middle.

I’ll keep playing with Chrome, but I still don’t see it replacing Firefox for me anytime soon.





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