Tech Blog

Late 2011 Macbook Pro

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 20:28:03 +0000

I picked up one of the first 2011 Macbook Pros back in January 2011 - you can read about that unit here. The unit was a big upgrade on the previous editions so I was keen to get one involved in my work life - my work can be quite demanding in terms of hardware requirements and having the option to run a lot of my virtualisation requirements on a single laptop was very appealing.

Unfortunately the ownership experience of that laptop hasn’t been great. I initially was quite pleased with the fact that SATA III was supported by the devices, however after continued use I ran into issues. I could not find a SATA III based SSD that would give me continuous and reliable performance.

You can read my early thoughts on the unit here.

I initially thought that the C300 was working just fine however I noticed certain performances oddities. You can read about my experiences here. I ended up pushing the SATA-III SSD into the OptiBay. On my very early 2011 unit the second port (I.e. the DVD drive port) was only a SATA-II interface so this dropped the speed but increased performance - both outright and consistency of performance. It worked well enough, but I was slightly disappointed at having to run something slower than I needed to.

Not brilliant then.

I saw the speed bump come out in October 2011 taking the top spec retail 17” unit from 2.2Ghz to 2.4Ghz. More interestingly I knew that both ports were on SATA-III interfaces now, and I expected that a lot of the issues with performance on SATA-III had been addressed. So, an upgrade was required.

Now I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro with the following specification:

Late 2011 Macbook Pro 17” (Glossy)
2.4Ghz Quad Core i7
16Gb RAM
256Gb Crucial M4 SATA-III SSD
750Gb Toshiba Hard Disk

I removed the DVD drive and installed the SSD instead. You can read about that process in my article here. It’s a very powerful configuration and I rarely use the DVD drive at all. I never miss it.

Now in terms of hard drive performance I can confirm that my SATA III based Crucial M4 256Gb SSD is now operating at full speed with no interruptions or pauses like I was experiencing. As you can see below, it’s connect at the full SATA III speed of 6Gbps:

I must admit it was a relief. Performance is better than the SATA II devices both in day to day operation and in terms of benchmarks. Obviously the benchmark difference is more extreme - SATA II SSDs are fast enough in their own right. The difference from going from physical drives to a SATA II SSD is far bigger than the step up from SATA II to a SATA III SSD. XBench stats for the drive are shown below.

Just for fun & giggles, compare it to the XBench stats from the 750Gb hard disk.

Quite a bit of difference there!

So far I’ve not had any performance issues at all with the drive. I’m happy with SATA III performance now - couldn’t (at this point!) ask for more.

The Xbench stats for the processor do show a minor improvement but nothing that significant - it’s only from 2.2Ghz to 2.4Ghz after all.

Let’s have a look at the Windows Performance indexes. Firstly, Windows 7 running natively in Boot Camp.

That’s quite impressive. Compare that the early 2011 2.2Ghz MBP with the slower SSD in it.

Memory and hard disk performance stats are vastly improved.

My normal ‘Office’ environment is a fully virtualised Windows 7 configuration in Parallels Desktop 7. I use the Boot Camp edition mainly for Unified Communications/Video demos where virtualisation doesn’t really cut it. The following shows the Windows Performance Index from my fully virtualised office Windows 7 environment.

This compares to the same virtual machine running on the early 2011 unit as follows:

I think there may be a few oddities going on with the Windows performance indexes there! Even so, it’s interesting to see the comparisons.

So what about the RAM? Why so much? I was interested to see that the units did support 16Gb of RAM. It was a put off though that to see a 16Gb upgrade for the laptop pros (with only two SO-DIMM slots) was punitive in terms of costs - over 1000US$ initially. I saw recently however that the price had dropped significantly to approximately 120GBP+VAT it made the option more accessible.

Having 16Gb on my iMac has proven incredibly powerful for running multiple guest operating systems - so upgrading my site work-horse to 16Gb was a valuable option. I can happily run 7 or 8 guest server operating systems - this is incredibly useful to me for so many different things.

Summary
So far, I’m very happy with the unit. It’s fast - the drive performance is amazing, and incredibly capable. It’s what my early 2011 unit should have been.

I’ve also put a video together showing around the unit, and demonstrating the performance. You can view that below - click through to see the high-definition version.

Lync for Mac 2011 - Crashes

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:41:32 +0100

The Lync client for Apple’s OSX platform was released recently - much to a sigh of relief from most Apple users. While Communicator 2011 was ‘OK’ it was on OCS 2007 R2 experience, not Lync, and so felt like the poor cousin of your fellow Windows Lync users.

Anyways, I ran into a problem. On all of my Mac machines Lync just wouldn’t run - I’d fire it up, sign in, and bang, it would crash. Nothing in the crash logs indicated much. It’s been infuriating. My google skills on this issue were pretty weak - searching for Lync for OSX/Mac didn’t result with any useful posts as the client was so new.

So, with much gritting of teeth I set about trying to track it down. Built up a new OSX Machine in this order:

Lion 10.7.0 -> Worked
Lion 10.7.1 -> Worked
Lion 10.7.2 -> Borked

RIght, easy you think - it’s 10.7.2 right? Oh if only it were that simple. Essentially what I worked out was that if I logged in to a machine that had syncronised Keychains from another machine running 10.7.2 then bang, Lync wouldn’t run.

So, to be clear, this machine running 10.7.0 on new account - just fine. Log in to account with sync’ed Keychain from another machine running 10.7.2 and it didn’t work.

Got closer then....So, after much digging around in the Keychain, I noticed something a bit odd in certificates - namely an ‘Unknown’ certificate:

After checking a clean 10.7.0/10.7.1 account this was not there - it’s only there on 10.7.2 generated accounts. Guess what - delete it, and your Lync client will work just fine.

How infuriating is that?

TimeMachine - Restoring Hidden Files

Mon, 5 Sep 2011 18:07:02 +0100

Quick and easy one today - how do you restore hidden files using TimeMachine?

I tried to restore a file today in my Library folder, and of course this is by default marked as hidden on OSX Lion. You can get to it of course using the ‘Go To Folder’ from the ‘Go’ menu on Finder - path is ~/Library.

Problem is of course is that the path does not show up when you go in to TimeMachine - so how do you restore stuff that’s in there?

After a couple of minutes brain freezing, I realised the issue wasn’t as complex as I imagined. You can simply configure Finder to show hidden files - TimeMachine uses Finder, so do this and your hidden files show up in TimeMachine. Job done.

The simplest way to do this is from Terminal. Start terminal, and enter these commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

...then go into TimeMachine and restore what you need.

To return to the previous state of play, where Finder does not show hidden files, enter the following in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

Something small & simple for today, and it’s about all my coded-out brain can cope with.

2011 iMac 27” SSD Upgrade

Fri, 5 Aug 2011 13:57:37 +0100

Update 5-8-11
I’ve added a video at the bottom of the page showing some performance and relevant bits about the specification.

Original Article
When they refreshed the Apple iMac range to the SandyBridge processors, I purchased one of the 3.4Ghz 27” i7 units. At the time, I really wanted one with an SSD in it however they were quoting up to 2 months delivery delay for those...and I’m just not that patient.

I thought now worries, I’ll pull it apart and throw an SSD in it. How hard can it be? Well, it turned out I was very wrong.

It appears that the hard drive has some extra connectors on that Apple use to monitor the temperature of the drive. If these lines do not receive the relevant information the fans on the hard disk ramp up to a gail - and you can’t hear yourself think or curse. Properly annoying. There’s an article at Macrumors about it.

So I ended up back with just the physical drive in there. Apparently you can short out connectors and the like to get around the issue but quite frankly that gave me the heeby-jeebies, so I didn’t want to do that.

Eventually though the performance on the physical 1Tb drive just didn’t cut it. When you’re used to using an SSD equipped i7 Macbook Pro, or an SSD equipped Macbook Air - anything running on a physical drive just feels slow.

I thought then I’d tackle the issue in the same way that I’d tackled the requirement on the Macbook Pro - by fitting a second hard disk in replacement of the DVD/SuperDrive. I rarely use the DVD drive anyway - I think optical is a dead media - and I also have a number of external USB drives anyway. What’s to lose?

Firstly, to replace the SuperDrive in the iMac I needed a suitable cage & cable. I managed to find a compatible unit from Other World Computing in the states. In fact, it’s this unit:

Data Doubler

This is listed as compatible with the 27” 2011 iMac - bingo. Ordered from the US using FedEx and it arrived within about 3 days I think. Cost was 65US$, with about 20US$ shipping. I’m sure I’ll get a bill for import duty at some point too.

Now, you may be able to source these via eBay and the like - I however wanted to make sure I had exactly the right unit so was willing to put up with the expense.

The unit comes with a drive try, cable, and a couple of screwdrivers (Torx) for the work. Note that the instructions only cover the MacMini - they don’t cover the instructions for the iMac range as they list the operation as ‘dangerous’. Go figure. So, I’ve taken some photos of the process to show you what is involved.

It’s not that hard, it just takes some patience and effort. All in the process took me about 40 minutes, including the time to stop and take a couple of photos and some notes.

So, what do we need?

The OWC Data Doubler Tray
A suitable SSD. I used a Crucial C300 SATA III 256Gb Unit
A Torx 10 screwdriver
A lint-free cloth
CLEAN HANDS!
Glass Suction Cups/Dent Pullers

Clean hands - you don’t want grease marks on your iMac panel. They’re infuriating. Another small note, but passing along through experience - take your watch or any jewellery off....

So how do we fit the drive?

Remove the Plastic Front Panel
Firstly, use the glass suction cups to ‘pull’ the cover screen away from the iMac. This is best done with the unit laying on the floor. It’s not that difficult and doesn’t take much force. To be fair you can do it with your fingers too if you’re careful.

Remove the Panel
You need to under the screws all around the panel. Make sure you don’t lose them! I put them all in a glass or the like to keep them all together.

Once all the screws are out, stand the machine up carefully and tilt it forward. The screen should tile out of the frame - gently tile it out until you can see the cables. There’s four cables you must disconnect to remove the panel.

The first one is the shortest and quite easy to break - so be careful. It’s in the top left hand corner of the assembly.

The connector comes out upward. Once you’ve done this one the screen will lean forward some more - again, carefully - and you’ll see a further three cables. Let’s start with the two on the right.

The cable on the left above is removed by gently pulling upward. The one the right has a metal bar (not clear in the photo unfortunately) that you ‘flip’ to release the edge connector.

When you’ve done those two, there’s another connection block on the LEFT of the machine.

That’s got a clip holder on so you need to lift it and then pull the connector out from the bottom. Make sense?

Once you’ve done all the connectors you can remove the panel and lay it on its back somewhere safe.

You should now have a clear view in to the very cool layout of the iMac.

The DVD that we’re going to replace is at the bottom of the picture.

Remove the DVD Drive
To remove the DVD drive, remove the four screws holding the housing to the frame. The whole unit should then be gently leveraged out.

You can then disconnect it from the main unit. Note that the heat sensor is stuck to the DVD - you’ll need a small knife to gently leverage the sensor from the case.

Remove the DVD from the DVD Frame
Next, you remove the DVD drive from the plastic housing. Pretty simple to do, the screws holding the unit in place are obvious.

You will also need to peel away the heat shielding/tape at the front of the DVD drive. I used a small knife to lift it, and then gently peeled it back.

You should be left with the empty DVD housing.

Fit the SSD/OptiBay
Next, we’re going to fit the DataDoubler/OptiBay. I’m assuming you’ve already fitted your SSD to the ‘bay, and fitted the adapter cable.

Simply place the bay into the DVD drive housing and replace the four screws. They should line up with the bay just fine. You can then replace the DVD housing in to the iMac infrastructure, not forgetting to screw it into place.

Fix the heat sensor to the drive, and make sure the adapter cable isn’t caught on anything. Also of course make sure it’s connected to the SATA feed for the DVD drive!

Reverse the Procedure
Next, you need to refit the panel, cables and screen in the reverse order listed. So pop the panel into the frame (easier while the frame is standing) and re-fit the two cables on the right, the block cable on the left, and the small cable in the top left hand corner. Be patient with these - the edge connector on the far right can be fidly to re-fit.

Once you’ve refitted the cables, push the panel back into the frame gently, and fit the screws. At this point dust the panel with the lint-free cloth. You can then refit the front panel.

Job done!

You’ve now successfully fitted an SSD to your iMac in replacement of the DVD drive.

Summary
When you look at About this Mac/More Info (System Report in Lion), you should hopefully see your SSD under ‘Serial ATA Devices’:

You can now go ahead and install Snow Leopard or Lion. Couple of things:

To select which drive to boot from holt down the ALT key while booting
You can install Lion to another drive by selecting ‘Show All Disks’ during the install process

On mine for example I still have Lion on the 1Tb internal drive and the SSD. I can choose which to boot from.

There are some other articles you may find useful now you have this multi-drive setup, including:

Enabling TRIM on non-Apple SSDs (working in Lion too)
OSX, OptiBay, and Drive Partitioning
Moving the iDisk Spares Bundle for MobileMe
Redirecting Folders on Apple OSX

Anyways, hope you found this useful.

Video Run Through

2011 Macbook Air - Early Thoughts

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:13:37 +0100

Update 1 August 2011
Video below.

Original Article
Anyone who has read any of my blog articles knows that I’m a big fan of the Apple hardware and OSX combination. It makes my life easier day in and day out. Bizarrely a life that is mostly spent designing & implementing large scale Microsoft based infrastructures - go figure.

Pretty much my entire working environment is now Apple based - I’d never thought that would happen when I first purchased a Macbook in white back in 2007. Back then, I just bought a base model white Macbook to play with as I’d heard they were quite good... Who knew?

I’ve written about my experiences with the 2010 Macbook Air - and the truth is I love the unit. So capable, easy to carry, and hey - it looks ace. It’s odd really looking at the specifications - it doesn’t seem anything special does it? C2D processor for example. It’s found itself a very firm home in my working environment as my travel buddy.

I was therefore very interested when the SandyBridge based Macbook Airs were announced. My excuse is that my lass needed a laptop for her school and that it was a prime opportunity to kill my gadget frenzy needyness and also my lass’ requirement for a laptop in one brilliantly self justifiable scoop.

So, off I trot and pick up a 2011 13” Macbook Air. Notice this time I went with the 13” over the 11.6”. Why? Well, I haven’t had one in 13” form so I thought I’d see how I got on with it. It doesn’t feel that much bigger than the 11.6”, and I’d certainly enjoy the increased screen real-estate.

My plan was to use it as a travel buddy again - my real work-horse laptop is a 17” 2011 Pro. It’s certainly not to replace that.

Let’s look at the specifications then:

1.8Ghz Core i7 Processor (Dual core, hyper-threading)
4Gb RAM
256Gb SSD (Flash Storage)
Thunderbolt Port
Intel HD 3000 Graphics (384Mb vRAM)

You can see the Apple specifications here.

That’s the top of the line version and retails at GBP1207+VAT. That’s a fair chunk for any laptop now isn’t it?

So, things of note on the hardware. The unit comes with 2 x USB ports, a SD Card slot, and a Thunderbolt port. Something to note about the Thunderbolt port though - it’s not the same implementation as that in the Macbook Pro from what I can gather. The MBP uses the Light Bridge chipset - as does the new Mac Mini and the current range of iMac units. These support up to four 10Gbps channels and two displays. The Air however uses the Eagle Ridge chip - this only supports two 10Gbps channels and one display.

This may not be significant, however it is worth bearing in mind. It’s especially not significant right now at the time of writing as there’s limited Thunderbolt devices available anyway!

Next, let’s look at the SATA support. You’ll see that the SATA chipset does support 6Gbps connectivity however the Apple branded SSD connects at 3Gbps, not the SATA-III spec of 6Gbps. The SSD of course is not a standard 2.5” unit either, it’s a custom form device - so it’s not easy to replace or upgrade.

According to Macrumors, Apple are still using different providers for their Air SSDs - some faster than others. The unit I received in 13” Air was a 256Gb Samsung drive (SM256C). This would indicate it’s the faster unit according to Macrumors. In the 11.6” Air, the drive is a TS128C - a Toshiba unit.

The Xbench stats compare below:

11.6” 2010 Macbook Air - 128Gb Toshiba SSD

13” 2011 Macbook Air - 256Gb Samsung SSD

As you can see there seems to be a significant increase in stats between the two units, pretty much bearing out what Macrumors stated. By way of comparison, here’s the specs for the SATA-III 6Gbps C300 drive, followed by the SATA II OCZ Vertex 2E unit - both in my Macbook Pro (albeit not at the same time).

Crucial C300

OCZ Vertex 2E

What about TRIM? Well, the 2011 Air comes with Lion natively, and TRIM is enabled by default:

This is good news. Note that putting Lion on to the 2010 Air did not result in the drive supporting TRIM. I had to use the TRIM hack on that unit, and my 2011 Macbook Pro, to enable TRIM.

On to the processor. Well, it’s not great surprise that the i7 unit in the 2011 Air offers a significant boost over the previous C2D units. The Xbench stats bear this out, as do the Windows BootCamp figures. Let’s look at the Xbench stats for the 2010 and 2011 Air units respectively:

2010 Macbook Air 1.6Ghz C2D

2011 Macbok Air 1.7Ghz Core i7

For comparison, here’s the one from my 3.4Ghz i7 iMac too:

As you can see, there’s a big improvement over the 2010 Macbook Air.

Another thing that’s interesting is that LION is provisioned now with a recovery partition. The below is from my LION equipped iMac:

When you start an OSX unit, holding down the ALT key gives you the choice of which OS to boot - OSX or Windows via BootCamp for example. Well, on a Lion unit you also get the option to boot the Lion recovery partition. I assume this is similar to what you’ll see on Windows units with a separate recovery partition? I’ll investigate that and report back once I’ve had a play.

In terms of performance in Windows, let’s look at the Windows Performance Index when running Windows 7 x64 in Boot Camp. Again, starting with the 2010 Macbook Air.

2010 11.6” Macbook Air

2011 1.8Ghz i7 Macbook Air

...and also the Win7 index from my 2011 Macbook Pro 2.2Ghz i7:

Impressive increase in performance across the board don’t you think?

The processor in the i7 Macbook Air is a dual core hyper-threading unit - so in Activity Monitor it shows as four processors:

What about the graphics? Well, to be fair I’m not a big graphics user. I don’t really notice much difference between my Air(s), Pro, or iMac. The CineBench benchmarks for the 2010 and 2011 Airs are shown below - they may help:

2010 Macbook Air

2011 Macbook Air

Again it looks like a significant improvement right? For comparison sake I’ve included the 3.4Ghz 2011 iMac below too:

Summary
So it’s a significant performance increase. But what else? Ok, it offers a back-lit keyboard too - a lot of people missed that, but personally it didn’t make that much difference to me.

As an office travel device - the ultra portable - it’s an incredibly capable unit. It’s faster than pretty much anything out there at the price and arguably looks fantastic.

Why would you buy one? Well, there’s a number of different attitudes to have here. If you’ve got a 2010 Macbook Air, should you upgrade? Well, personally I wouldn’t. Sure, the processor is faster - but here’s the thing, processors are not really the bottlenecks in such devices, the hard disk is. A C2D with an SSD will feel much the same as an i5 or i7 with an SSD in terms of running Word/Excel and general day to day stuff. My 11.6” 2010 Air feels much like my 2011 13” Air in reality.

If I had an older C2D Macbook or Pro, with a physical hard disk in it - and didn’t need Optical - well, I’d go for the Air. It’s an awesome bit of kit. Reasons not to go for the Air?

: General requirement for Optical - having an external can be tiresome. But hey, opitcal is on it’s way out right? Interesting that the new Mini has no optical either - and there’s rumours of a 15” Air equivalent - again no optical?
: Bigger screen. 15.4” and 17” units are only currently available on the current Macbook pro range.
: Expandability. 8Gb or 16Gb (if you’re rich) available in the Pro range, as well as the ability to expand the hard drives.

I won’t be able to replace my 17” Macbook Pro powerhouse - the Air would not be able to run my demo suite for a start. But as a general day to day unit for travel - it’s a cracking piece of kit. If I didn’t have the requirement to run multiple servers on site in a demo environment I’d do away with the 17” Macbook pro entirely, and just have my iMac & the Air.

I’ll add some videos to this blog showing general performance, so check back. In the meantime, if you have any general questions drop me a line and I’ll see if I can answer them for you.

Apple OSX Lion - Installing on Multiple Macs

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:33:41 +0100

Obvious one this, but a few people seem to have missed it - how do you install Lion to multiple machines without having to download it from the App Store everytime?

The answer is pretty simple.

Firstly, buy it and download it from the App Store. Now, before you upgrade your first machine, have a look in your Applications folder - you’ll see the Lion installer in there. Simply copy somewhere else before upgrading your machine.

You can then use that installer on your other machines, avoiding the downloading.

There’s also a way of creating a DVD too - I’ll write that up tomorrow if I get the chance.

Apple OSX Lion & Communicator 2011

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:29:29 +0100

Today I noticed an odd issue with Microsoft Communicator 2011 after upgrading my machines to Apple OSX Lion. Essentially every time I try to IM people - it crashed.

The reason it’s odd is that I’ve not had this issue at all on any of the previous beta releases of the platform - just the retail released today. Ho hum.

Anyways, after digging it appears the issue is with the 13.1.1 update to Communicator - the one that provisions the screen share functionality. Removing Communicator and installing v13 without the update resolves the issue.

I’ve been told that 13.1.2 is due out imminently and will fix this issue, so till then you’ll have to do without screen-share functionality.

2011 Apple iMac

Fri, 20 May 2011 07:48:47 +0100

As you may know, I recently upgraded to a 2011 Macbook Pro. It’s shown itself to be an incredibly capable unit. Very fast, and simply awesome for my uses.

Anyways, I’ve been looking to rationalise a lot of the kit I use as I’ve ended up with a very disparate set up. A number of small PCs, and an old HP DL360 that I use for running some virtual stuff. It was getting a bit out of hand.

So I saw the announcement of the 2011 Sandy Bridge based Apple iMacs and I thought it offered up a great chance to consolidate my stuff. This is based on my experience of virtualisation on OSX - it’s awesome.

In the end I picked up one of the fast i7 units in 27” form. Specification is:

3.4Ghz i7 Quad Core
4Gb RAM
1Tb Hard Disk
AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 1Gb

My plan was to upgrade the RAM to 16Gb and put in an SSD. I originally wanted to buy the SSD equipped unit however this was showing at 4-6 weeks out, so I opted for the physical drive unit thinking I’d throw in an SSD once I’d got the unit. Oh noes...

First, the memory upgrade. The iMac has four memory slots making an upgrade to 16Gb RAM relatively painless on the wallet. It was about 130GBP to upgrade.

A lot cheaper than the Macbook Pro - that only has two slots so you need to put in 8Gb chips.... They’ll hurt your bank balance. Crucial were not listing a 16Gb upgrade kit for the iMac however as they use the same RAM as the 2011 Macbook Pros I simply ordered two lots of the 8Gb kits for the ‘pro - and ended up with 16Gb RAM.

As you can see above - I use it too! Having a lot of VMs running, lots of apps, some video encoding going on ... soon chews up the memory.

So, what about the hard disk? Well, firstly taking apart an iMac is not for the feint of heart - certainly if you’re worried about warranty. It involves taking the glass off of the front & unscrewing and tipping out the video panel. It’s not that hard - just takes a little patience. I used a couple of glass suction cups to pull the glass off.

There’s a number of connectors to remove from the back of the video panel - be careful with those! I’m not going to run through how to do that upgrade as a simple Google search will reveal lots of videos and run throughs.... It’s easy enough, took my about 20 minutes.

So, I take it apart, pop in an SSD, and fire it up. Wow, this thing is fast. XBench stats with the SSD in place:

Those disk stats are from a SATA III based Crucial C300 SSD. I was happy as Larry. For a bit. Then I noticed the noise. Essentially the hard disk fans were cranking up to 5k plus. All the time - permanently . This sucked.

After investigation it would appear that Apple have integrated the heat sensing mechanism into the hard drive cables. There’s an article here at Macrumors about it. Incredibly frustrating.

So... I had to strip the unit back down again and pop the physical drive back in. Never mind.

To be fair, the supplied 7200 RPM hard disk isn’t too shabby:

...but that’s still less than half of the throughput I get on my SSD equipped Macbook Pro and Mac Mini.

Disappointment a bit.....Moving on.

I now have the machine set up how I want it and I have to say it’s a great platform. Very fast and it scales incredibly well with all my virtualisation stuff. The 27” screen is a joy to use - you get used to the screen estate at 2560 x 1440 pixels. It makes my 24” Apple Cinema Display look small.....

This video here shows a run through of the general performance and some other comments about the hardware.

Let’s have a look at some of the performance benchmarks. Firstly, Windows 7 in Boot Camp.

The limiting factor there is the physical hard disk - everything else is a 7.6. Pretty nice hey! The following shows the Windows Performance Index while running a Parallels virtualised session.

Very impressive. Not quite sure how the hard disk transfer rate gets a higher score in Parallels than physical? Maybe there’s something going on with the caching.

We can also look at some Xbench stats. Firstly, the processor & RAM:

We can compare that to the 2011 Macbook Pro Quad Core i7 at 2.2Ghz:

Quite a significant improvement if the stats are to be believed. It’s a little difficult for me to judge given that my MBP has an SSD in it - with iMac having 16Gb of RAM yes I can do more on it, but the outright performance feels slightly constrained compared to my MBP if that makes sense.

What about video? Well here’s the video performance:

...compared to the Macbook Pro:

Now, I don’t play games or do much that’s video intensive so I don’t really notice the difference......

In terms of outright performance the main place I see the performance increase is in things like video encoding for YouTube, and DVD ripping. It absolutely flies - a 2 hour DVD takes about 20 minutes ish to run through Handbrake. That’s pretty impressive.

I guess the real benefit from the processing power and the RAM comes from the ability to do so much more concurrently, and not worrying about closing things down. For example on my older laptops/Mini I couldn’t really use them for anything else while ripping a DVD for example - where as now I just push it into one of the other spaces and forget about it till it’s finished. Same with video encoding.

I also seem to leave a lot of my Virtual Machines running all the time now - it’s useful not having to close down and swap things around. Saves time. Honest!

Any problems? Well, yes, of course there’s going to be some problems. Firstly of course there’s the hard disk issue I mentioned earlier. The other one is to do with Thunderbolt video connections - they make Apple Cinema screens flash.

With my Macbook Pro set up I used use it in clamshell mode hooked up to a 24” Apple Cinema display. This worked fine with the 2009 & 2010 units - with the 2011 Thunderbolt equipped Macbook Pro it proved to be unworkable. The screen would black out for a second or so now and again - and it became more & more often to the point that, for me, it make it unworkable.

Now, I thought the iMac would be different... but oh no, plug in the Apple 24” Cinema display into the Thunderbolt port and yes, the same blacking out. Annoying as hell.

Just to be clear, this 24” Cinema Display works absolutely fine with my Macbook Air and my 2009 Mac Mini - and it’s worked with every other non-Thunderbolt equipped unit I could throw at it. It’s just an issue when connected to a Thunderbolt mini-display port. Article at Macrumors here about it. There’s also a video (not mine):

... so it’s certainly not all plain sailing. I’m hoping there’ll be a fix for that at some point as having the two big screens is a fantastic way to work.

Anyways, I’ve now got a very capable set up that I can throw anything at and get great performance. I expect it’ll do me for a very long time. Well, at least until the fall refreshes anyway!

If you’ve any questions on the unit drop me a line and I’ll see if I can help.

TimeMachine - What's being backed up?

Sat, 7 May 2011 10:07:18 +0100

Apple’s TimeMachine technology in Leopard and Snow Leopard is by far one of the best and most effective backup technologies I’ve come across for desktop environments. It backups up your stuff every hour, and is very much fire & forget. Restoring is also incredibly simple.

When setting up a machine for TimeMachine backups however I sometimes come across the issue where every hour the backup engine tries to backup up a lot of data. Recently for example I noticed that every hour the unit was trying to backup some 40Gb of data. That couldn’t be right - I don’t generate 40Gb of data every single hour. Honest.

I actually found it quite difficult to work out what exactly TimeMachine was backing up in this rotation. After a bit of research, I came across and application called TimeTracker. What this little app does is analyses your TimeMachine backups and shows you the delta between each unit. For example, here’s the display from my recently set up 2011 Macbook Pro:

The first backup was on 29 April to the most recent this morning. You can see that it backed up 85MiB in the latest one, and 10.2GiB in the previous one. You can further drill down in to each backup to see exactly what was backed up.

For example, if I drill down in to the showing a 10.2GiB delta, I can see this:

7.6GiB backed up from DataVol and 2.5GiB from my main OSX volume. You can further go through each level to see what specific files had been backed up.

Very useful if you find yourself backing up a lot of data regularly and you don’t know why.

In my case, it turned out to be some Parallels Disk Images that I’d put in a different area as a ‘dump’. Of course, every time I fired up the virtual machine the disks changed resulting in them being backed up in the next rotation.

I’ve found it a handy little app. It’s obviously in early stages of development - the read me details it as a BETA. Also, it doesn’t have it’s own icon(!), but it seems easy and quick to use.

Anyways, thought you may find that little gem useful. If you didn’t see the download above, you can download it from here.

CUCM 7 & Microsoft Lync - Call disconnections

Fri, 6 May 2011 23:06:17 +0100

Wow, I’m doing a Lync blog - who knew? Haven’t been doing anything like as much detailed tech work recently, hence the lack of tech blogging. Still loving the product set though - I think it’s ace.

Some of our users had been reporting disconnections on our Enterprise Voice service - in particular in the dial-in PSTN conferencing. It’s taken me a while to nail as I’ve been unable to replicate the issue on my mobile or dial in. Essentially what happens is you’ll be in a PSTN conference when *bang* you just get unceremoniously dumped out of it.

It seems if it happens once it’ll happen a lot in that conference.

Like I say, tricky to nail as I was unable to replicate it.

Anyways, today I spend some time properly reading through the logs and traces to see if I could nail the issue. The first thing I spotted was that a number of people were having issues transferring calls between internal users - the call would be disconnected.

That was easy to fix - you can disable Refer Support in the Trunk Configuration and that deals with that little issue:

I’m quite surprised I missed that one - having configured Lync to CUCM quite a few times I know to do this otherwise you run in to issues.

Anyways, the disconnection proved far harder to trace - I wasn’t seeing failures on the Lync side of the configuration at all....from what I could tell anyway. I’ve been slowly going SIP-log blind today.

I got talking to one of our IPT techs and they mentioned an issue they used to run into with active calls timing out if no media stream was being received for a certain period. It certainly sounded similar anyway. We did some digging and came across some settings in the trunk configuration that we thought may deal with the issue - namely RTCActiveCalls.

You can read all the parameters for the Set-CSTrunkConfiguration here however the setting I was interested in was the RTCActiveCalls:

So, changing this configuration to FALSE and bingo, the disconnections are gone.

While this in itself is not that revolutionary, what bothered me was that this finding had come through discussion with experienced technicians, it had not come through detailed log fault finding.

I’ll look at this again when I’m less SIP-blind.....Personally I like to understand why something makes a difference to functionality, rather than just knowing it does - otherwise what have you really learned from the process?