Foray into Macdom part 2
As I explained last time, I broke out the Mac I had lying around, blew off the dust and upgraded it. However, now was the time to get really serious!
When I first purchased the laptop, it came with an external USB wireless network dongle. While this worked reasonably well for short periods of time, it would always cut off after a while and would also get very hot to the touch. What’s more, I found out that the Mac had a spare AirPort slot just waiting to be used! I instantly packaged up the dongle with all its accessories and sold it on eBay. With the money and some more I put in, I found a brand new original AirPort card on eBay and purchased it. Since Apple stopped manufacturing these things a few years ago, they’ve been like gold dust, especially brand new packaged ones!
Fortunately, the card arrived in excellent condition in a couple of days. I plugged it in (don’t you just love DIY repairs, especially when they’re allowed by the manufacturer?) and set it off. After a little tweaking with my wireless router, the thing worked like a charm, allowing me for the first time to run my laptop completely wire-free!
The final thing left to do was to get some software onto it and get everything ready and tweaked. I downloaded a few essentials like a text editor, some Dashboard widgets and a few other tweaks from the internet (using the new wireless connection!), and also purchased a copy of Panic’s excellent Transmit FTP software. As a final little twist, I also found out about macZOT!’s MyzteryZOT 5 and entered it with my $5, which is not very much money at all. I await the results to see what software I’ve got, and I’ll report on the results as soon as I get them.
Overall, however, my foray into the Mac world has been very enjoyable and I hope you’ve liked reading up on what I’ve been doing both with the Mac and in connection with getting ready for university life armed with a fabulous laptop!