Some things I have had in my mind for a while but for which I'm lazy to post full-blown posts:
  • Updated the internal Hitachi 160GB 5400RPM drive to a Seagate Momentus 7200.2. There is a lot of people who say that the difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM is negligible in laptop disks. Screw that. For daily tasks (browse the network, read your mail, etc.) it may not be too noticeable, but for disk intensive operations it really is.

    Some numbers: Half-Life 2 now takes 20 seconds less (from a total of 1'50") to start. A NetBSD build.sh sets now takes 1'52" compared to the 4'15" it took before. A NetBSD build.sh release with already-built sources (i.e. a release build that does no CPU-intensive operations) has been cut down to half the total time: 11'53" now as opposed to the old 23'10". And I didn't "benchmark" iPhoto, but it surely starts up much faster now. Quite a bit of a difference I say!

  • The video card, an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 128MB, is starting to show its limits. Been trying some game demos and they are barely playable at the native resolution, 1440x900, which is the lowest I have found at the 16:10 aspect ratio. I refuse to play with an aspect ratio that does not match the physical screen...

    BioShock is usable but with game detail set to a minimum, and even then some scenarios feel slow. I feel that this game should look gorgeous with high detail settings. F.E.A.R. is certainly playable (finished it) but with details set to a relatively low level. Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions is simply unusable.

  • Silent computing... well, the machine is truly silent when doing light operations, but I hate doing heavyweight tasks on it such as building NetBSD, encoding video or playing games. Not because it is slow, but because the fans spin up to their maximum speed (around 6000RPM) and they make a damn lot of noise. Maybe this noise would not be that noticeable on a desktop computer, but as we are talking of a laptop, we are very close to the fans during usage.

  • Been using the external Apple USB keyboard I have (not the new flat model, which by the way looks cool) with the laptop for a while. That keyboard is crap after some months of usage. It does not feel smooth to the touch any more. The MacBook Pro's built-in keyboard is much, much better.

  • /me considering a Mac Pro in the not-so-distant future.