So it turns out I’ve been living with a very big mistake for well over a year now. (If any of you guessed Jonah, Elisha or Erin, well, then ha ha ha, NO.)
I’ve been using LinoType’s excellent Font Explorer X to manage my extensive font collection. It’s nifty in that it can auto-activate fonts for various projects, it’s simple to use, and it’s free.
As you might guess, I have thousands of fonts. Some 3000 actually. And over the course of time I’ve been gradually activating a font here and a font there, and, moron that I apparently am, not deactivating any fonts.
So Mac OS X has been been puttering along under the crushing weight of 249 activated, wholly optional fonts. Guess what happened on Asgard, the new MacBook Pro when I deactivated those fonts?
If you supposed that it flew like a banshee, you supposed right. So let that be a lesson: Idiocy does not pay.
Safari 2 wouldn’t stop crashing, so I also downloaded Apple’s beta of Safari 3. I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned font deactivation or if it’s Safari 3 (or both), but I have never seen web pages load faster. Furthermore, make sure you check out the Inline Find feature for searching within a web page. (Hit Apple + F to bring it up.) Tell me you’re not impressed. Best of all, though, even with an updated version of Saft installed, Safari 3 hasn’t crashed.
The issues of speed and stability now resolved, I find the MacBook Pro much more to my liking. I continue to need more hard drive space, which I can’t really blame on the Mac, but I’ve removed the blue color cast of the super-bright LED screen by recalibrating the screen. It’d be a terrible thing to do if I were trying to achieve color fidelity between screen and printed output, but I’m not, so there it is.
It’s early on yet in my time with Asgard, but I’m sufficiently impressed to give it an 8.5 out 10. If all goes well in the next several months, I’ll probably revise that number upward.