Mac Laptops

[Serapth]

I am starting to think a retarded monkey wrote the Mountain Lion networking stack... Wifi is flaky as shit and just outright hates certain access points, especially adhoc ones. To make matters worse, the USB tethering simply does not work.

I think part of it is the actual chipset itself, as even booted into Windows, the Wifi is spotty at best. Hands down the worst part of the experience so far.

[Slack3r78]

Originally Posted by muddi900

You had trouble with the Wifi because Aluminium blocks signals.

Yeah, you just outsmarted an entire industry of engineers who would never consider construction material and antenna placement during the design phase. :rolleyes:

Apple has had terrible wifi driver issues for years. My MBP would regularly KP due to Apple's Atheros driver for the better part of a year after the transition to 10.5. OS X also does a few things that technically break spec when establishing a connection that make for faster reconnecs to networks most of the time, but can occasionally cause oddness with the right combination of networking equipment.

But you know, feel free to keep making authoritative statements on the matter.

[muddi900]

Oy, I am an Engineer! I must be, I went to school for this shit.

[Slack3r78]

Originally Posted by muddi900

Oy, I am an Engineer! I must be, I went to school for this shit.

Okay, and that's supposed to make your out of hand dismissal of the issue less ridiculous how?

[muddi900]

I never dismissed the issue, I presented a possible cause. Low wifi aignals are a trade-off. Then Serapth pointed out the issue is far more severe than before. Without condescension.

[Khrymsyn]

Originally Posted by Slack3r78

Yeah, you just outsmarted an entire industry of engineers who would never consider construction material and antenna placement during the design phase. :rolleyes:

After all, Apple would never put design over function so no one would ever have signal problems, right?

[Inverarity]

Just to follow up on my previous note: dual external monitors work great. I set up a pair of Dell 2209WS screens, using DVI adapters, and everything seemed to run fine. I haven't had a chance to really push the graphics, but there was no apparent lag.

I also ran four simultaneous Windows VMs (XP Pro, 7 Pro, Server 2003 R2, Server 2008) with no noticeable slowdown. I assigned them to different screens in the multi-monitor setup, but, really, the ability to push VMWare to full screen and then swipe among the active VMs is almost as good as having the extra monitors. (I wasn't totally sold on turning on gesture support for the trackpad, but I'm starting to see the light after a little adjustment.) I need to play around with the way that OS X 10.8 handles fullscreen behavior and workspaces to see if I can come up with a way to best utilize fullscreen apps and multiple monitors.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good RDP client that supports fullscreen? I'd like to do the same thing with remote sessions that I'm doing with VMs, but the options seem limited.

Oh, and the fan noise is definitely a big improvement over the current generation of non-retina MacBooks. The fans are quieter and less harsh by a long shot.

I expect to set up a small Boot Camp partition with Windows 7, just so that I can get a feel for the difference in performance. Since this isn't a gaming machine, I think the benefits of running VMs in OS X will outweigh the performance gains of running in Boot Camp, but I'll be interested to see if there's much difference when it's running Windows on the hardware.

[Khrymsyn]

Inverarity, if you're only trying to remote desktop Windows machines, you can always use RDP for Mac that Microsoft makes.

[Inverarity]

Doesn't support full screen under 10.8 (making the swipe gestures available), and it's been abandoned for a little while now. It works well on my Snow Leopard machine at home, but that's the last OS revision that was officially supported, as far as I know.

[Mot Wakorb]

Originally Posted by Inverarity

Doesn't support full screen under 10.8 (making the swipe gestures available), and it's been abandoned for a little while now. It works well on my Snow Leopard machine at home, but that's the last OS revision that was officially supported, as far as I know.

iTap RDP. That'll do it for you. It'll cost you some, but it's so very worth it.

[J Arcane]

I think there's a Splashtop desktop client now.

[Inverarity]

Originally Posted by Mot Wakorb

iTap RDP. That'll do it for you. It'll cost you some, but it's so very worth it.

Their iOS RDP client is extremely good, and I use it on a regular basis. I didn't know there was a MacOS version. Thanks!

[Serapth]

I've noticed another major OSX flaw... its really chatty at least by default.

I have a 10GB cell plan, and this laptop is just eating through it doing nothing. Booted to Windows it uses bascially no data, maybe 1/2 a MB an hour if that other than Windows Update, which is still trivial in usage.

The MacOS however burns through easily 50-100mb an hour, for no apparent reason.

I'm only 10 days in and 5gb of my plan is gone, I really need to get to the bottom of this.

[Inverarity]

You're using 10.8.2, right? I'll have a look at my traffic and see if I see the same behavior. I assume you haven't set up Time Machine backups to a network drive, or something in that vein...

[Serapth]

Originally Posted by Inverarity

You're using 10.8.2, right? I'll have a look at my traffic and see if I see the same behavior. I assume you haven't set up Time Machine backups to a network drive, or something in that vein...

Yeah. 10.8.2.

Already have part of the solution.

Apparently the AppStore automatically downloads updates as of ML without notification.

The problem is, the downloader is idiotic and will start over on a lost connection, which ispretty common tethered so it downloads the same update again and again and again. Ill be turning this off post haste and see how much of a difference it makes.

[Inverarity]

That would definitely cause a hit, yeah. I might want to disable that setting myself - could you post results when you make that change?

I just ran an hour-plus (3800s) capture with WireShark, and it reported an average usage of .005 Mbit/sec, or about 2.25 MB/hour. That seems much more in line with what I'd expect from an idle system. I suspect your situation will improve greatly with the background downloading disabled.

[Serapth]

Another annoyance is, ML wont seem to USB tether with an LTE modem. After playing around for an hour or so, then spending half an hour with my ISP, we declared it broken.

This did however solve another problem I had. When I had my phone plugged in over USB wifi would no longer work. It seems that ML detected my Android phone, but can't communicate with it. However, when plugged in, it attempted to use that network instead of all others. Deleting the Android Phone under network connections allows me to Wifi connect to my phone while it charges over USB. The connection is still a bit wonky, I often need to toggle wifi off and on to get things working again, but I am not positive I wont blame some of that on my ISP.

It really sees like networking is the Mac OS achilles heel.

I do like ( love in fact ), that Mac finally admits that maximizing a windows is in fact a good thing, the new fullscreen interface, especially coupled with a three finger swipe, is a thing of beauty... only took you 15 years

[Serapth]

Originally Posted by Inverarity

That would definitely cause a hit, yeah. I might want to disable that setting myself - could you post results when you make that change?

I just ran an hour-plus (3800s) capture with WireShark, and it reported an average usage of .005 Mbit/sec, or about 2.25 MB/hour. That seems much more in line with what I'd expect from an idle system. I suspect your situation will improve greatly with the background downloading disabled.

I will let you know the effect when I can monitor it. ATM I am actually using the network, so I cant measure idle traffic. Usage does seem to be down a ton though, sent and receive seem to be hovering around the 1kb/sec range, which is reasonable.

[Serapth]

Why the hell is iPhoto update 1.2gb???