Pgoodwin1

The MacBook Pro can be upgraded more easily, giving you more performance down the road. The case comes apart with screws, where you have to split the iMac case with a little pizza cutter looking tool to break the adhesive. But as mentioned above, it really comes down to how you want to use it. With the laptop, it's portability and battery life may change the way you use the computer if you are currently not using a laptop. It's nice to be able to use the computer wherever you want. Both are great machines. My prior iMac (2002 Flat Panel G4) gave me 8 good years with just a RAM upgrade after 4 years. and the only reason I replaced it was that the kids wanted to play online games, and after 8 years, the web-based game complexity got so high, that the iMac wasn't good enough for them. My wife's 2006 MacBook Pro is still soldiering on fine with only a RAM upgrade and a bigger and faster HDD at about the 6 year point. Whichever you get, load it up with as much as you can afford.

Again, this morning I'm getting the normal fast (for me) speed readings on the Dallas server....see the last two points on the chart/data list Note that the ping times are about the same as last night when I was experiencing the really slow download times.

I'm still having issues when speed testing on the Dallas server. I get 3x the speed using the Washington DC server, which shows a speed more like I'm used to seeing during prime time evening hours on the Dallas aerver. When I do the TraceMy.net trace test, the ping times I see are very close to what I see when my speeds are registering normal - during non-prime time hours. I'm puzzled by the extremely low speeds I'm seeing using the Dallas server. Anyone have any idea what the issue(s) might be? This phenomenon has been going on for a while now-like 3 weeks or so. Note that the Dallas server is identified with the star in the upper data picture. And the Washing DC server is the US flag. Note. I get ping times like these when I'm registering close to 15 Mbps download from either server. When on the Dallas server, and my speeds are very low like the above ~3 Mbps, my ping times are virtually the same.

The guts of the PCs and Macs for sale are pretty similar. What the PC hardware has going for it is the customization aspect, where a skilled person can build what he wants. The average user can't really do it without getting himself into trouble from a lot of different engineering aspects. To me, the PC and Mac OSs are where the real differences are. Apple has more control over all the hardware/OS and OS/AS interfaces and the result is their integration results in fewer anomalies than Windows. The PC manufacturers can do a good job integrating their hardware with the version of Windows that ships with the units. Some of them do a lot better job than others. When both the OS and the hardware are new, they all have a much bigger challenge. Once the user gets a machine, the likelihood of it staying secure and stable is much higher with OS X because of the tight controls Apple has in place on application software in their app stores. A savvy person can keep a PC secure and stable. A not-so-savvy person has a much bigger challenge because the applications can come from anywhere. Plus the malware developers target PCs by orders of magnitude more than Macs. One of my bigger issues with MS has been that their developer brains don't work like mine. The logic they use to name and locate functions in the OS escapes me. Too many times, after a frustrating search, my thoughts are "why would anyone put that there?" And "Why did they call it that?". That and it always takes twice as many mouse clicks to do things. Years ago, the initial cost of getting Macs was higher than the PC. It's not any more. When you load up a PC with equivalent hardware now (from a store), the Mac prices are on par. So it basically comes down to the design and quality systems of the PC supplier. In the case of Apple, their hardware design and quality are consistently among the best.

I just tried the TraceMy.net tool. It's already great. I've only spent minutes with it and don't claim yet to understand everything it's telling me. But, I got normal looking Up and Down speeds this morning on the Dallas server, so I know what the trace looks like under normal operating conditions. It showed a couple of 600+ millisecond ping numbers, and I don't know how good, bad, or typical that is for Time Warner Cincinnati; it sounds really long. I pulled up a Community graph and it looks like an order of magnitude lower ping numbers, but since my times were as fast as they are when everything is working right, I expect the 625 mS ping numbers were normal for my ISP. My TWC plan isn't one of their fast ones; it's just one step up from their minimum offered plan (if I remember right). For all I know, they program in delays for the cheap plans and remove them for the expensive ones, and everybody uses the same equipment. I'll play with TraceMy.net some more soon, and maybe ask some specific questions The one thing that confused me a little with the TraceMy.net results was the security for sharing info that came up. It talked about creating a TMN ID. I guessed that that message was for new users without a TMN ID that would be using the eventual released version, and it was telling them to sign up for a TMN account. I wasn't sure though that the data I was looking at with the IP addresses was something I should be sharing. As I said, I haven't played with it much yet, so I'm sure I'll figure stuff out after I use it more. Your note comes up after a trace route test "Make this safe to share by removing identifying target information and converting the address into an anonymous TMN ID." After I hit the link part of that "Make this safe to share", it displays a similar page with a temporary note saying that it was safe to share. But I couldn't tell what the difference was from the prior page that supposedly wasn't safe to share. Note-9/3/13-I figured out the difference.

IMHO nobody makes better computers/OS than Apple. I've used them since 1988. And every one I've ever had was a fantastic machine that lasted for years problem free. And like you said, it just works. It hurts going to the office once a week (I'm retired now) and using the PC. And my wife's work Dell laptop she uses is only a year old, and it's just a so so laptop. Her 2006 MacBook Pro is still tooling along great. When you amortize the real costs of a Mac over a PC including OS updates, and security software costs for the PCs, the Macs are are a bargain when you price them with equivalent hardware.

Tonight is back doing the same thing.mtye Dallas server gives very slow Download times, where the CDN Alt Route and Washington DC server show what my equipment usually looks like for downloads. Also note that the upload times on the CDN Alt server is roughly 1/2 what it shows on the Dallas and Washington DC servers IMac: The star is Dallas. The flag is Washington. The plain stack icon is the CDN Alt Route server. Here's the similar iPad results: The slow intermittent upload speed on the CDN Alt server seems to be intermittent. Every once in a while I get a normal upload speed on it (about 0.8-0.9 Mbps

Strange. This morning it's working fine on both the iPad and the iMac. Must have been a warp in the force. Any idea what would cause that rapid fall off at the tail end of the test? Virtually every test I run does it. Smartest, or choosing file sizes, they all have that ramp down at the end that lowers the average speed value.

Using the Alternate CDN Push Alternate Route to Dallas, the times were very fast. Faster than than using the Washington DC server by 30-50%, and 4-5 times faster than the standard Dallas server default With a few more tests on the CDN Alt Route, I saw quite a variation in test results. Most of them were very good on download, but one was really low like the standard Dallas server numbers (down). I also saw some number using the CDN Alt route that were 1/2 of normal for upload speeds. The standard Dalla and Washington servers pretty much always give me about 0.8-1 Mbps, and the ALt CDN route was giving me about 0.35 a little bit ago for upload. Dallas Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:46:39 pm 448 kB 708 Kbps 89 kB/s 598569765972 Time Warner Cable jyvFmt4 share Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:46:31 pm 4.2 MB 4.78 Mbps 598 kB/s 598569765972 Time Warner Cable a5rymhu share Washington Washington Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:46:12 pm 928 kB 1.03 Mbps 128 kB/s Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:45:52 pm 13 MB 11.28 Mbps 1.41 MB/s CDN Alt Push Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:41:51 pm 448 kB 343 Kbps Wed Aug 14 2013 @ 11:41:26 pm 12.8 MB 17.24 Mbps

The last couple of days, I've been registering really low speeds when using my normal default Dallas server. It's giving me speeds less than 1/3 of what I see on the Washington DC server. Is there a problem on that server? Normally I'm between 10-15 Mbps down on that server. I was measuring as low as 3 tonight, and in the 5-8 range last night. Happens on more than one device (iPad and iMac) I've rebooted my Airport Extreme, Cable Modem and Router - no help. Plus, when I use the Washington DC server, I see times that are pretty normal looking for this time of night on Time Warner Cincinnati I'm not Multi threading

Sounds horrid. I've heard about how intrusive Google is so I didn't open a Google account. I only use their search engine and maps and whatever else they have that's available without a Google account. I wonder how many other little snitches there are. I don't have the expertise to understand what everything in Activity Monitor is showing me. There's nothing in my GoogleSoftwareUpdate folder newer than 2010 And I don't have Chrome installed

This is TWC here over a two week period at various times of day.

I offered the above data to show what I think is normal and typical for TWC. Obviously the TWC in your area won't be the same, but if you see performance that looks like mine, I wouldn't call it atypical of Time Warner's service. I've never seen TWC's cable service flat like CA3LE's showing. Even before this site had the graphic display of the TIP, you could watch the progress bar during the test and see it speeding up and slowing down. With TWC, I'm happy that they now at least provide me with an average that is close to what they advertised. Before their 1st of the year upgrade here, I was always 20% to 50% below what they advertised as their minimum.

For reference, here's some fairly typical performance with TWC (Cincinnati). Dallas server, not multithreaded TIP Summaries 07/27/13 ~ 7:30 PM. 15 MB download test, Dallas server, not a multi thread test Minimum :: 7.07 Mbps | Middle :: 14.79 Mbps | Maximum :: 25.86 Mbps Minimum :: 5.73 Mbps | Middle :: 14.38 Mbps | Maximum :: 24.97 Mbps Minimum :: 6.88 Mbps | Middle :: 16.58 Mbps | Maximum :: 27.16 Mbps Variations on all three runs were 65-70% - pretty typical for my TWC during prime time evening hours. In off hours, there is a little less variation with averages in 14-16 Mbps range. But TWC has always had a lot of variation. I can usually tell by how slow or fast Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant video downloads/starts shows. My average results for those three runs above: Sat Jul 27 2013 @ 7:32:07 pm 25 MB 14.47 Mbps 1.81 MB/s Sat Jul 27 2013 @ 7:31:03 pm 25 MB 12.7 Mbps 1.59 MB/s Sat Jul 27 2013 @ 7:28:33 pm 25 MB 13.77 Mbps 1.72 MB/s

I'm on TWC Cincinnati. The first of the year they upgraded their services. I'm on the turbo 15 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up plan. Since the first of the year, I've had pretty consistent results testing here showing that they are meeting the 15 Mbps down. I get about 0.8 Mbps up speeds measured here. Prior to the first of the year upgrade, I was only getting about 8 Mbps down and the same 0.8 up speed I got prior to the upgrade. Their old plan said up to 10 Mbps, and I very rarely ever got 10 except for an occasional burst. The newer service is consistently right around the 15 Mbps speed they advertise. This upgrade was likely only for the TWC Cincinnati area though. Your results may be worse if the equipment and service they're providing you is like the older equipment was here. They didn't change my cable modem, only the service on their stuff outside my house.

Starting out as a pretty good day for speeds. A stock iPad 2. Time Warner Cincinnati. They upgraded their basic service (with Turbo) the first of this year from 10 to 15 Mbps min. It's been pretty solid all year Cable modem is a Motorola SurfBoard SB5101 Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station

eBay is probably your best bet. But before you shop for one, download Mactracker - it's available for Windows as well,as for Macs. It'll give you detailed info on every Mac model going back to the beginning of the Macs (the 128K model). It's a great tool. Don't buy anything older than those machines having at least an i3 Intel processor. The Core 2 Duo machines will run the latest software but they're getting pretty old, and will be obsolete much sooner.

Yes. As long as electronics are kept cool, they can run a long long time. Some of the newer modems even de-power their ports to save energy, so at night when you're not accessing the LAN ports, the modem is basically just idling and not dissipating much power. Not sure if yours has the energy saver stuff in it, but even if it doesn't, during long periods of doing little work, the thing will have no problem running all night, as long as it's in an area that allows what little heat they generate to rise above it and away from it. As long as there's reasonable air space around it and the air isn't hot, those things should last.

I have an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station wireless router and it has the USB port on it. The Mac OS recognized it right away, and I don't know why Windows wouldn't either in this day and age. It's pretty handy. I bought a 2 TB and partitioned it into 2 x 1 TB drives, one for me, and one for the wife. Both partitions showed up fine.

Yeah. It's amazing how easy I got used to life on the Internet without Flash - I use an iPad for almost all my web browsing. If a site tells me I need Flash, I just move on, life's to short to worry about it. And there are plenty of good sites that don't require it; more all the time. There's so many places to find what you need, like you said, you just pass that one up. I've gotten to where if I really need to be on a site with Flash, I use my Mac remotely from the iPad with Splashtop Streamer. But it's not very often I even bother.

That ad stuff doesn't really bother me if they are fixed ads in dedicated space that isn't interfering with or taking away excessive space on a page. The annoying pop-ups that come back even after you hit the close box and hover over what you're looking at drive me nuts. And if you disable pop-ups, too many things break that you need pop-ups for. And you're welcome

I thought maybe I could have found that UA string in Apple's System Profiler somewhere but I gave up after looking for a while and used that website

And it only took literally 10s of minutes for those ads to start appearing. Oh well. At least if it's being tailored to what I looked at it's not some BS I don't care about. So if I have to be bombarded with ads, at least they're something I'm interested in.

Speaking of who sees what. Tailored ads base on what products I've recently searched for in Google is getting obscenely quick. I researched an audio mixer the other day, and every day since, 1/2 the sites I go to have an ad on it with the same model.

Before you sent me the link to that website, I searched the iMac for "com.Apple.Safari". And for "UserAgent" and it didn't tell me where they were. I know they're in a library somewhere.