I got the new Macbook Pro in the mail last week.  I haven’t posted about it because I’ve been busy playing with it, and fixing it.  It was a real bummer to have to work on my new computer, especially since time is limited.  I can only do so much between diaper changes and breaking up fights between the boys (oh, and dealing with a little stomach bug, but you don’t want to know about that do you?).

I order the MBP with Logic Express loaded by Apple.  I don’t mind installing this stuff myself, but I thought why not just have them do it and save me some time.  Big mistake.  I will never again have them install an application for me at the factory.

In the tracking slip for the computer I noticed it took the long journey from China, to Anchorage, to Memphis, to my home.  Somewhere in between it got a bug in the Logic Express installation.  Every time I would try to launch the app it would crash.  Sometimes I would get it to launch, only to have it crash when opening a new project.  This really stunk.

I scoured the internet for all kinds of fixes and tried them all.  You can reset the RAM, you can start in safe mode and launch it then log in again and try it.  You can create another user for the computer and log out, log into the new user, and then log back in as yourself and try it.  You can delete the caches in various places, you can re-install Logic Express.  You can download all the updates for Snow Leopard and Logic Express and give it a go.

Finally you can just re-install the OS from the disk they send with your computer, then re-install Logic Express from it’s disk and it will run just fine.  My recommendation is that you just do the re-install of the OS and skip all the headaches of the other stuff.

Thanks to all the people on the internet with the other tips though, I learned a lot about Snow Leopard and some of it’s quirks while doing my research.

Now I am very happy with my compooter.  It’s awesome.

As a musician, I find Logic Express totally killer compared to the Cubase I have always used.  I really love the Snow Leopard OS, and the really cool white LED’s that light up my keyboard are the best.

A word of advice for anyone buying a Macbook Pro: If the peripherals you plan to use with your new computer are firewire 400 peripherals, you are going to need to buy a firewire 800 to 400 adapter.  I missed this little detail and now I can’t use my pre-amp until I buy an adapter.  They are around $10 to $20 dollars, so if you maxed out your credit card buying the machine you may have to get into your kids piggy bank to buy an adapter.

The trackpad on these new Macs is excellent.  You can do so many things with your fingers, like turn pages, go back and forward in Safari, re-size windows, scroll the browser and other things I haven’t discovered yet.  The applications support all kinds of functions using the trackpad too, like moving sliders on the mixer in Logic Express, and turning knobs in virtual amplifiers.  I really like it, it’s similar to the way the iPhone interface works.

So that’s about all I know right now.  One more thing, it’s great having an Intel based machine now so the iPhone SDK will run without having to hack a bunch of stuff.  The new SDK cannot be forced to run on a PPC anyway.  I already loaded the latest iPhone SDK and can’t wait to find the time to start my apps.

Ahhh, just living the dream.  I still love Apple.