WOW on a MacBook – Get a good mouse!
Last night I took my little hunter out for a trip to Darkshore. My goal – to tame a Ghost Saber. As he just turned 23 I thought it wouldn’t be too hard, yet still a wee bit challenging if I would run into any alliance going hostile on me. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out my MacBook. In could be interesting to know that I’ve pimped my MacBook to 4 GB of RAM.
The game flows very nice on the Mac although I’ve turned down the video settings a bit. It still looks good. The biggest problem though was the mouse. I have a wireless mighty mouse. Using the right mouse button is a pain. I died a few times due to my inability to maneuver correctly. I blame this mostly on myself being unused to how the mouse behaved – and not having all my usual mods installed. That’s right. I played "naked". You quickly realize how important certain mods are for your playing experience. For example I use Bongos2 for a good actionbar layout.
In the end I got my new Ghost Saber and headed back to Ashenvale. To my disappointment, I was never bothered by any alliance. In fact the area felt very desolate. I did spot the Moonstalkers and I have to admit that they are probably the most cool looking cats in the game with their black and blue stripes. Damnit.
WOW performance on a MacBook
When the latest Leopard upgrade came there was a glorious cheer from the Mac gaming community. Apparently the new upgrade did a few wonders to the way Leopard handles 3D graphics. (Check out tuaw.com‘s report.)
Yay! While I never intended my own black little MacBook to be a gaming rig I just had to see how WOW would perform on it. But actually getting WOW onto the machine proved a bigger task for me.
I started out by downloading the client from wow-europe.com – which took the whole night. After the install there was numerous new patches to download. Finally logging in… "This account has been upgrade to TBC, you need to download the Burning Crusade".. Oh no.. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to download TBC too. Plugging in the MacBook from the office gave me at least ridiculously high download speed and after only 20 min I had the TBC client downloaded. Installing that and downloading a new slew of updates took an additional 20 minutes.
I had the feeling that after all this preparation the game would run extremely poorly on my MacBook. I was wrong. It was very much playable! Now I’ve only zipped around a little in the Barrens and not entered any of the major cities but the performance was impressive for the little MacBook. Granted the video settings are set to medium (or low) but it still looks ok.
I’ll post some more data when I’ve had more time to fully test it.
MacBook upgraded
I recently bought a black MacBook and became a true mac-fan. My only use for the MacBook is to use it to write and manage photos. I also really needed a light laptop, since my Dell XPS M1710 hardly qualifies as a portable laptop.
Anyway when I bought the laptop it came with 1GB memory and additional memory from the apple store was insanely expensive. So after looking at various Mac forums I learned what memory fit and what doesn’t. There is actually an abundance of information for mac users when it comes to upgrade their Macs. Everything from detailed and helpful forum posts to heaps of instructional videos on youtube. I ordered 2 x 2GB memory banks from webhallen for just below € 100 and they arrived three days later.
Getting into the MacBook proved to be the biggest challenge – you really need tiny screwdrivers to get in there. Almost no violence at all was required to swap the memory banks.
Going from 1GB RAM to 4GB made my MacBook very speedy. A noticeable performance increase in switching between applications and giving the whole system a little less sluggishness.
Unfortunately for my wallet… this upgrade was just the first. I’ve decided to invest into a new wireless network, integrating my Mac, TV and consoles into one glorious organism. More on that later though.
