World of Warcraft on a 13" Retina Macbook Pro

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:46:27 +0000

I stopped playing WoW in 2008, and since I didn’t need Windows for gaming, I ended up putting Fedora (and ultimately Ubuntu) on my old Core 2 Duo desktop. After years of fighting with slow computers, I recently bit the bullet and bought the 13" Retina Macbook Pro (MGX82LL/A). Even though I hadn’t played WoW in years - or any other PC games, for that matter - the gamer in me was still reluctant to go with a computer with no dedicated video card. I’d read up extensively on the Intel Iris 5100 chipset in the Macbook but I couldn’t find anything about its performance in WoW, which was the least-taxing game I could think of.

Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:04:54 +0000

A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all. Last week, I decided to put the final nail in Linux’s coffin by taking the SSD (Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D)out of it and putting it in my Macbook. The Macbook was pretty fast (Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz) but some things were noticeably slower on its 7200RPM disk than on Linux with an SSD, especially running Windows VMs.

Macbook on Evan Hoffman

World of Warcraft on a 13" Retina Macbook Pro

Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.