The Ultimate macOS Thread

I'm pretty sure the connector is different between these iPods.


Assuming the price is right and you go for one of the later specs (Early 2008 is the last gen for the Black MacBooks) then it can still be a zippy little machine that will be capable of running Mountain Lion, don't expect too much of it though. A friend of mine is still running his Early 2008 with an SSD and 4GB of RAM (it can actually go up to 6GB) and he's very happy with it :)

True, plus, the laptop I currently have is from the same time frame but with a low end Core 2 duo and slightly better intel graphics. Honestly, I don't do any gaming so, the graphics is not a big deal. I've been thinking about putting in an SSD in it and pulling the disk drive to replace it with a decent sized hard drive.
 
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My late-2008 C2D MBP is doing pretty well with 8 GB of RAM and a 7,200 RPM 750 Gb HDD. Not the fastest machine ever, but it's still good enough for Aperture and CS5.
 
Final Gear Top Tip: disabling webpage previews in Safari speeds up load time by a factor of one trillion.
 
Alright. Something screwy is going on with my computer. The "Email with attachment" and "Set desktop picture" from my right-click menu turned into German!

http://img99.imageshack.**/img99/1006/screenshot20120407at104.png

Everything else is still in English as usual, it's just these two menu items that went weird.
 
Check the language settings under the Language and Text in System Preferences.
 
I'm having an annoying issue with the Airport card in my 4 month old MacBook Pro. In the last week or so it will randomly slow right down. It isn't dependant on network since when I am on the same network as my girlfriend, hers is as quick as it can be and mine won't load any pages and the same goes with the wifi in the studio at uni where upto 30 people can be connected in the room. On top of that, yesterday morning, I had to restart it twice just so it would recognise that the wifi card was actually installed as it came up with an error when I tried to connect.

Any advice before I make an effort to go to an Apple store?
 
Had it be only slow, I would have tried to suggest some stuff, but since it went undetected a few times, I'd suggest to take it to the Apple Store.
 
That was the answer I was sort of expecting to get. Thanks though.

It is annoying it has to happen at this time when I need my computer more than ever to get my coursework done but that's the way things go!
 
Do you have Time Machine enabled? I have noticed slow downs in internet performance when TM is running, not since I installed latest updates but before it did happen. It also had a weird thing when waking up from sleep and TM starts a back up it would actually lose Wi-Fi and the only way to get it back was to wait for the back up to fail... again hasn't happened in a long ass time after some updates.
 
Is page out's the bad one or page in's?

Picture_1.png
 
I do have time machine on, but then again my system is as up to date as I can make it. I might actually turn it off for a while to see if that makes any difference. It's an interesting proposition/fix, but certainly worth a go.

Earlier I booted up into the hardware test to see if it showed anything. It didn't. When I logged back in it took a good few minutes for it to find and connect the internet.

If it worsens over the next few weeks I'll trek up to Aberdeen or along to Glasgow to the Apple Shop. But I can only do that after final hand in.
 
Paging generally is moving stuff between memory and the hard drive.

Page in means stuff gets requested by some application that is not in memory, hence it is loaded from the hard drive. This is not bad in and of itself, since everything must eventually come from the hard drive.
Page out means memory content gets pushed to the hard drive to free up space (not to be confused with for example saving a file). This is "the bad one" if used excessively, mechanical hard drives are literally millions of times slower than memory while even SSDs still are hundreds of times slower.
 
I do have time machine on, but then again my system is as up to date as I can make it. I might actually turn it off for a while to see if that makes any difference. It's an interesting proposition/fix, but certainly worth a go.

Earlier I booted up into the hardware test to see if it showed anything. It didn't. When I logged back in it took a good few minutes for it to find and connect the internet.

If it worsens over the next few weeks I'll trek up to Aberdeen or along to Glasgow to the Apple Shop. But I can only do that after final hand in.

Try making a small partition on your drive and install a fresh copy of the OS on that. Pain in the ass I know, but it should help diagnose whether or not this is a hardware or software issue.

Paging generally is moving stuff between memory and the hard drive.

Page in means stuff gets requested by some application that is not in memory, hence it is loaded from the hard drive. This is not bad in and of itself, since everything must eventually come from the hard drive.
Page out means memory content gets pushed to the hard drive to free up space (not to be confused with for example saving a file). This is "the bad one" if used excessively, mechanical hard drives are literally millions of times slower than memory while even SSDs still are hundreds of times slower.

Most desktop hard drives now write at around 120MB/s (not megabits, megabytes). For the case of current MBPs, iMacs and minis, the memory transfer rate is 10.666GBs. Under 100x faster. Not quite millions, but still bloody awful.

The low latency and faster speed of SSDs brings that down nicely, so page outs are much less of an issue with them. Apple are essentially relying on paging out with the Air. However, it's still not great, and is still a performance burden. It's...not great, marginally better than the "bloody awful" with mechanical drives.
 
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Most desktop hard drives now write at around 120MB/s (not megabits, megabytes). For the case of current MBPs, iMacs and minis, the memory transfer rate is 10.666GBs. Under 100x faster. Not quite millions, but still bloody awful.

The linear read/write speed is fairly irrelevant for the small blocks of data that likely are requested. What matters is the time it takes to position the head and wait for the data to come spinning round again. Even with modern HDDs this still takes 10ish milliseconds. Due to lack of moving parts in RAM this is reduced to a couple of nanoseconds. You'll find a factor of millions between those two.
 
Yesterday I had a 65 lb. dog trip over the cord plugged into my headphone jack of my MacBook. Now 90% of the time nothing plugged into the headphone jack is recognized. The other 10% I can wiggle the plug inside the jack and if I get it just right it will play out of only one side, until the cord moves slightly and the internal speakers kick in.

Anyone else have an issue like this? I've read that the headphone jack is built into the logic board and there is no reasonable way to fix it (Applecare ran out, its a late 2007 MacBook). All my setting are correct, its definitely a hardware issue.
 
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