Freddie grows fangs

Freddie, my new MacBook Pro, has been living with me for not quite three weeks; we took a week-long business trip together. In some ways I’m more impressed than ever.

In others, I’m like the honeymoon husband who says, “But sweetheart–you never told me you could only sleep on a bed stuffed with earth from your native homeland. And how come my neck hurts?”

Make no mistake, there are still a lot of things I love about Freddie; the degree of thought that went into her design is staggering.

Uninstalling on Windows can be tedious and long-winded. Uninstalling on a Mac (if they’ve used “packages”) is as simple as dragging the unwanted application folder to the trash. Macs only have one-button mice (which drives me crazy) but put a two-button mouse on Freddie and she uses both buttons without hesitation.

Most of my issues, to be fair, aren’t with the computer but instead with Parallels and Microsoft’s Mac Office suite. Parallels lets you run Windows XP alongside Mac OS X.

Running Windows XP on a Mac is one of the reasons I bought Freddie in the first place, as I said before, but given my experience to date it’s not reliable enough for business. And a really dumb tech support policy from the Parallels folks doesn’t help. Most problems, fortunately aren’t fatal:

• Even with Parallels Tools installed, Windows can’t consistently recognize devices. Filling in a field in a form usually makes the mouse cursor disappear until I dip down to a Mac window and back.
• I’ve yet to be able to write to a CD or DVD from within Windows, even though Parallels says it’s turned on and active. Worse, while Parallels is running I can’t always get to the DVD drive from the Mac side, either.
• Ditto for USB, although a dual reboot (Mac and Windows) usually brings it back.
• Parallels’ dual-mode XP screen is bigger than the laptop screen and I can’t reduce it, which means that the Start bar is off the page and unusable. The only way I can access the Start panel is to move to fullscreen mode, which means I lose the Mac environment unless I have a second screen attached to Freddie.
• More seriously, Parallels/Windows completely lost network access the moment I left home for the airport. Neither I or a very skilled network manager could figure out the problem.

So I spent the trip in an electronic bucket brigade, working in XP, saving my files into a shared Windows/Mac folder, switching to Mac and retrieving them, then mailing or uploading them wherever they needed to go. It took about two hours of that nonsense to have me wondering why I hadn’t just bought a plain old Windows machine for much less money and skipped the whole Parallels experience.

Parallels support, which waited almost a week to respond, arrived too late to save the trip. They told me to once again to install the latest build of their software, which got the network going again. This is the third build I’ve had in less than a month; I’ve seen beta cycles that aren’t that fast.

Finally, I mostly abandoned Windows for the MS Office Mac trial version that came pre-loaded on Freddie…and that started a whole new set of problems. Every time I did any major operation in MS Office I got a nag screen telling me to buy a copy, and some operations such as print were strictly forbidden.

The nagging extends to e-mail—it wasn’t until a bunch of mails didn’t go through that I tried some mail trials and discovered that Office was substituting an “Office 2004 Test Drive User” name for mine in all my e-mails. My clients’ mail filters automatically dumped them in the junk mail folders.

Microsoft doesn’t let you buy a license key and unlock the trial version (you must delete it before you can install the one you’ve bought). I had purchased a copy but in the week it took to arrive I got enough MS-nagging to last two lifetimes.

Freddie, however, remains as charming as ever, even with the Parallels limitations. About the only thing I’m really disappointed by is her sound system; you’d think Apple could figure out a way to shield the MBP’s mini-plug jack to avoid all the truly painful noise. The salesman suggested I buy a set of Bose USB speakers “to ensure there’s no system noise.” Now I see why.

So…would I have been better off buying a Windows laptop? Let’s not go there yet. There’s enough good stuff about the MBP that I’m determined to make this marriage work.

Who knows? Maybe the next Parallels build will solve all my problems.

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