Simon's Blog

Trying to push my MacBook Pro to the limit.

I recently upgraded my Mac Book Pro (Fall 2011) to 16GB. Just day to day work I get 0 page outs. But I also have a lot of memory just sitting there idle.

So I am attempting to see how far I can push it. At the moment I have the following setup running and the machine isn’t even breaking a sweat. Note: Picture does not show all my other day to day applications running outside the VM.

The plan is to set up multiple partition servers with cluster on the Windows VM, along with another Domino server to run as another domain. After that if I am bored I’ll stick on Sametime server.

Life without Flash.

Using flash on the Mac has been for sometime quite painful. Even a trivial flash app will bump the CPU up, and most times causing the fans to kick into overdrive.

On a Macbook Air, it is quite painful to listen to the machine screaming because someone sent me a link to some cat doing something funny.

I’ve noticed since getting the iPad there is very little if any website that requires me to have flash to view it. So I removed Flash from my Mac to see how I get on (as well as Silverlight).

Overall I’ve found that I don’t need it. Youtube works for the most part. Some videos fail to load, although not always due to the video.

Some sites that I found working on the iPad failed horribly with “You need Flash” messages. Changing the USER-Agent string to mimic an iPad, these sites worked again by switching over to HTML5.

From the Silverlight end, only Netflix is the site I’ve come across that becomes non-functional.

So from my experience, Flash is not a needed to enjoy internet media.