It's not the MacBook. It's the parasite I installed on it.
For the past month, I've been juggling the Vista desktop I use at home for development, the Vista notebook I use for school, the Windows XP tablet that I have for my day job, and this wonderful MacBook that doesn't have many applications I actually use to produce things. It's cool to blog with it, chat, and play with the camera, but it's really just eye-candy. I can't do schoolwork with it (they require Office 2K7 documents), I can't find an FTP program for it, and I really can't figure out how to edit raw text - a very important feature I need to edit HTML and do programming.
To combat my two-computer dining room table, I installed Windows (the aforementioned parasite) on the MacBook using VMWare's VMFusion. It's a wonderful piece of software and it is very similar to Parallels, only cheaper ($40 vs. $80). I installed the trial of VMFusion, and an old copy of Windows XP. It has effectively slowed my MacBook to where it takes a full eight seconds to open a new tab in Firefox. It's working really hard right now on installing SP3, and I'm sure a slew of updates are in store after that is finished. It has Office 2007 and I shouldn't need much more to do everything that I need to do on this beautiful 13-inch MacBook.
The cool thing is that if I ever get really sick of the reduced speed, I can close the Virtual Machine and Windows goes away like a little troll in the closet. I feel powerful.
Okay, I know it's slow because I am only running 1GB RAM on this computer with two operating systems running. A fix (4GB) is on the way. After the updates and the memory upgrade I should have no problem. I might even install Ubuntu on another VM.
Must go now; I have to write a post to tell everyone that the Web Spider project is not dead - I'm just busy.
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