thats standard, and legit - M$ are tightening up on their security recovery practices, thats why they want the extra info. There was a thread about it 2-3 days ago

Italy threatens Apple with a higher fine for pitiful warranty period - The Inquirer

cough...

Mac (running OSX,Win7,WinXP,OpenSolaris,BSD, and Linux)

[No hardware problems with my old black Macbook or 2nd gen. Mac Mini but at least I can open 'em & fix 'em. No hardware problems with my old Acer Travelmate either, come to think about it.]

PS: Those iPod repair prices are pretty eyewatering, which is why I replaced the battery in my iPod Classic myself!

iPhone expenses app
 

Dear Gurus

Have been searching for a suitable app to track my freelance expenses/mileage/hotac costs etc. Keeping good records is not one of my strong points.

Someone was trying to tell me that there is a version that will email the info direct to your accountant on a regular basis.

Is someone blowing smoke up my jetpipe?

IPad help
 

Why does my IPad not remember me? I have to log on every time to Pprune, am OK on other sites.
Please reply slowly as I don't read too fast! Thanks.

Have you tried caressing it?


I wrote slowly.

Macbook pro issues
 

Hi there
I'd like to know if any of you know about a specific program that can allow me to use the 737 CBT any other program like the PMDG 737NG flight sim on my Macbook?any help is welcome

these maybe

Apple - Support - Boot Camp

Run Windows on Mac - Windows and Mac side-by-side with Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac

Suggest you check their support forums first though

Further to Milo's post, VMWare Fusion might also be worth looking at.

Anyone going to try Mountain Lion tomorrow or prudently wait until the bugs surface and are ironed out. Frankly at the price on offer I will give it a go and trust that Apple have eliminated most of the junk.

aviate1138,

On the assumption you've got a good backup (you should be doing regular backups anyway, irrespective of computing platform !) then I would say go for it. If you're worried, run it in a VMware instance for a few days.

The last few OS releases from Apple have demonstrated great improvements from release to release (I class "improvements" as performance and important functionality, mostly under-the-hood stuff rather than any secondary bells and whistles in the GUI). The present 10.7 is my favourite release to date.

Although I had official access to the 10.8 release well ahead of time, I hardly used it apart from in a Vmware instance for a few hours to provide feedback to a section of the Apple development team with feedback to confirm whether a couple of minor bugs and enhancement-requests I'd reported for 10.7 had been squashed and/or introduced in time for the base 10.8 release. Plus it wouldn't be right to build opinions based upon pre-release software which by nature is expected to be buggy in places.

Mixture

re the various VMs / emulators for Windows on Mac. Have you any personal preference? Any major advantage of one over the other? Its something I know little about

Hi Milo,

Well, Bootcamp is not really an emulator, its just drivers for native running on the hardware. Never used that solution myself, but can't imagine anything being wrong with it.... infact, if performance is top of the agenda, that will probably remain your first choice.

I used Parallels for a while, but found it had various limitations and its emulation was a bit basic in terms of what it emulated. But that was v5, maybe a little v6..... so things may have changed in v7.

Some reasons I settled on VMware (don't know to what extent Parallels have been playing catch-up) :
- At the time I switched from Parallels, I quite liked the stability of Fusion
- It also was the only product to support high screen resolutions
- Fusion had better networking, theirs is a low-level implementation
- I found Fusion had a better virtual drive performance
- The Mac version of VMware Fusion was also natively built on Apple software libraries, rather than Parallels reliance on some third party libraries.
- Support for a broader array of guest operating systems
- VMWare obviously have a bit of a pedigree in the virtualisation world, although its probably unrealistic to expect much cross-pollination from esxi to Fusion.

At 15.99 euros, its hard to pass up, but i will wait until my travels are finished before experimenting....

Mutt

Didnt think starting a new thread would be cool, so i'll ask here. Im looking for earbud recommendations. Im currently getting more and more disappointed with the apple earbuds that came with my phone. My budget is pretty open but nothing to ridiculous. Any ideas? What do you use?

I've just finished downloading Mountain Lion. On first inspection everything seems to work well. It has taken about 4 1/2 hours to download and install, but I do have a fairly slow broadband here in rural Warwickshire. The process itself was very easy. Macworld.com has some good articles about how to prepare your machine for the big event which I found easy to follow: I don't think of myself as being very computer able, although I can generally use them well enough. This is my first MacBook Pro, and my first Apple upgrade process: I am very impressed.

Firestorm this may be one reason it took so long.

Broadband operators saw huge spike in traffic after Mountain Lion launch - Mac software - Macworld UK

Living up the road from you in Brum it took me a couple of hours to complete the process. However I'm still trying to work out what the new software does. I haven't noticed any difference in the operation apart from upgrades going through the apps.

I'm not surprised by that crewmeal, and I knew that was a likely situation. Added to which I live at the far end of the exchange so I get a pretty poor download rate. Anyway, it's done now.

All in all it works well, and I haven't found any problems. I quite liked 'Notes' being integrated with mail. I like messages (I had the beta version for a month or so just for fun), and I'm not convinced that I will use 'reminders' as I set reminders in ical. The new Safari layout looks good, and works well. The real benefits might be more apparent when IOS 6 comes out for iPods and iPads later in the year.

@ ChipperJones
 

I'm with you in not particularly liking the Apple ear buds. You might want to check out Newegg: Newegg.com - Accessories, in ear buds

Scroll down a bit to get to the higher quality brands. I had a Sennheiser set which lasted well. I'd gotten them for about $19 on sale from about $40. But that sale seems to be gone.

I've also bought through dealmac.com and have found good buys there.

Having read the reviews it seems to me that the main purpose of Mountain Lion is to provide support for Mac mobile devices. Since I haven't got any, is there any other reason to upgrade?

Sunnyjohn,

Apple give you 200 reasons on their website here.

Fundamentally, yes, the major headline changes are the social media and sharing stuff.

However behind the scenes, there have been new APIs introduced and improvements to existing APIs. It will of course take a little time for all the third-party software developers to adopt these.

I would say, if you are on 10.7.4 now (i.e. 10.7 with all the current updates), then no need to rush, upgrade when you're ready, but don't wait forever (I'm saying months, a year max.... i.e time for a few 10.8 dot releases to happen).

Apple haven't completely stopped development on the 10.7 branch, just are not introducing new features, just tweaking and fixing existing , there's a 10.7.5 update in the pipeline focusing on graphics performance and quality (can't tell you more than that... since its under Developer NDA).

If you are not on 10.7 now, then you might as well go all the way up to 10.8.