I wrestled with Vista SP1 for the better part of Friday night and early Saturday morning and after roughly a dozen or more restarts I’ve uninstalled. I rely on my machine to restore from hibernate and sleep daily and SP1 admittedly broke that functionality. I had higher hopes. This was the shortest amount of time any Windows SP has lasted for me before hitting a problem that was worse than the original, about 15 hours. I tried numerous changes to my video settings to no avail and I don’t have time to mess around with a laptop that can’t "recover" from sleep. In a comment to this post Bill Meyer clued me in to the fact that this isn’t a new problem for Vista which doesn’t bode well when it comes to hoping for a fix. On a positive note, the  uninstalled worked as advertised and I haven't (yet) noticed any additional problems and sleep now works as it did before.

Any other MacBook Pro/Vista users experiencing this issue?

[Update: March 29, 2008] Update the link to the release notes since the original link to Microsoft's website no longer works.

I’ve gone back and forth on this for awhile now and I’m wondering what you think. I’ve read a bunch of iPod Touch reviews but nothing has really swayed me either way. Most of the reviews are pre-Mac World '08 so details on the new features are scant. I did play with one while at the store and like the iPhone, it’s very slick and definitely has geek appeal. Another important question I have is whether or not the upcoming iPhone SDK will be supported? I asked two different people working at the Apple store over the weekend and didn’t get an straight yes or no answer, it was more of a "we don’t know".

The main reason I haven’t/wouldn’t go with an iPhone is the price of the contract which would significantly increase my monthly bill, not something I’m interested in.

Anyway, what’s your opinion on the iPod Touch (post Mac World '08 of course)?

While I really enjoy working on the MacBook Pro there is what I consider a rather annoying design flaw which really bothers me and I’m not alone, here too. The front edge of the keyboard where your wrists hits closest to your body is a sharp squared off edge that I’m finding that that really wears on the tender bottom side of my wrists. In contrast, the outside edges of the machine are all rounded and very smooth.

I’m a long time fan of the split Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro and require upside down "T" arranged arrow keys as well as the layout of the Home/End/Insert/Delete/PGUP/PGDN keys and when at home that’s the keyboard I use. In fact, I’ve collected a few of them because Microsoft no longer produces this exact keyboard. For me, Jeff Atwood nails keyboard issues in this podcast from Scott Hanselman. Aside from this one issue I’m really enjoying the machine and Vista still runs well though I can’t say I’m thrilled with Vista.

I recently purchased a LinkSys Wireless-N router ($99 on sale at Radio Shack) so I can roam around the house with my laptop. As a result I decided to do some bandwidth testing using broadbandreports.com's speed test as there is a server in Palo Alto, ~26 miles from my home, and it seemed like the results I was getting from Firefox were a bit slow. I started up IE to do some comparisons and found a not insignificant difference. As you can see on the graphic ComCast is my ISP which is easily three to four times as fast as what I was getting with my old DSL connection.

Results Using Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16473

Results Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6

These results have been fairly consistent across a number of tests. I'm wondering if there is perhaps a performance penalty for running Firefox from a USB drive? All of these tests were conducted on my laptop.

I'll have test again at the office (also wireless) tomorrow and see how things compare. Of course, I'll probably install Firefox for a true apples-to-apples comparison.

A few weeks ago I bought a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB 2.0 Flash drive ($39.95 @ Costco) with the intent of it being a convenient way to move files around. After using for a bit to do just that I've been playing with portable applications and I must say they rock! I'm using FireFox, Google Talk, Skype, Thunderbird and Trillian all working on this drive. Basically, this drive contains my communications tools and has made it easy to move quickly onto my new work machine.

Kudos to the folks over at www.portableapps.com!

[Update: July 24] The apps just keep coming. I just added Notepad++ and 7Zip to my drive and there is now a PortableApps Suite available. Cool!