Creative Xmod

So in my search for a way to listen to my music and watch movies on my laptop through speakers, I decided to look in the realm of USB audio adapters.  While there's lots of little cheap-o things that look like thumb-drives with an audio jack, I came across something at Circuit City that really caught my eye.  

The Creative Xmod plugs in to a USB port and has three audio ports; one for speakers, one for headphones (that over-ride the speakers when plugged in), and one for input (microphone or other external source such as MP3 player, gaming system, etc).  It has a built in volume and mute control via a slick brushed metal jog dial too.  But the greatest thing (besides true plug-and-play with Macs) is the "X-Fi" enhancements that are built in and controllable.  One, the Crystalizer, "cleans the sound to studio quality" by enhancing the lows and highs and cleaning out artifacts on highly compressed sound.  I was fairly skeptical at first, but it makes a huge impact.  I really didn't know what I was missing before this; as cheesy as that sounds, it is leaps and bounds past what it sounds like without it turned on.  This makes is noticeably better than the on-board sound the laptop has (even if there was some way to enable the audio out to work with my Hacintosh install; I am comparing it to the sound out of the jacks using Windows).  The second enhancement is the CMSS-3D enhancement.  It basically simulates surround-sound with two speakers.  It does add depth to the sound, but I'm not sure I'd call it surround-sound.  Where it really shines, though, is with headphones.  It really transforms a stereo sound into something much, much deeper.  Both of these enhancements are user-customizable through a mouse-like click button on the controller itself in conjunction with the jog-dial.

Not only am I excited to have real speakers again for my music and movie library (the on-board speakers, like all laptop speakers, are tinny and too quite for this), I was highly, highly impressed with the Xmod's sound enhancements.  Add to that, a slick, on-control customization system (which allows the enhancements to be controlled when using the Xmod with something other than a computer), and Creative put out a great little USB audio adapter.  Now for the good and bad news:  Circuit City has it on clearance.  This makes it a great deal, but it also spells doom for this wonderful little device.  Creative has taken the Xmod name and turned it into a wireless sound system solution.  If you're in the market for a great USB audio adapter, don't pass up this deal.  It is far and beyond what the on-board audio sounds like on my laptop, and I'm willing to bet it will sound better than most soundcards, short of more expensive high-end cards.

VMWare Fusion

Wow.  This program is cool.  I need Windows for one very important thing (my Sansa Connect MP3 player), and thus far have tried every MTP solution out there for Mac to no avail.  I realized tonight that I could avoid chucking the player or repartitioning and dual booting by creating a virtual machine with XP.  For those less geekier than I, virtualization involves running another operating system within your native one (Mac OS X Leopard, for me).  VMWare Fusion creates a false hard drive for Window XP  (or Vista, or any Linux distro, etc) to install to.  For me, I kept it small as I only needed it for Windows Media Player to connect to my MP3 player.  And having access to Internet Explorer for school and work will be nice too.

The cool thing about Fusion?  Not only is it fast (just as fast as any native program; I'm assuming that's because I have a dual-core processor to split tasks), but it fully integrates with my Leopard desktop.  This means that Windows windows float with my Mac windows on my desktop seamlessly (except for their borders, of course).  And get this: Leopard somehow knows (I'm assuming that some part of Fusion tells it) that my MP3 player will only work with Windows, and therefore automatically passes it through when connected, as long as XP is running too.  Any of my other USB devices I have to explicitly tell to connect to XP if I need them (which I don't).  I'm pretty damn impressed.

Theoretically, I can run games through it too since it has DirectX 9 support, but I don't really feel the need to.  I'll probably give it a go at some point though; I need a FPS fix soon.  lol

The Update

So after several failed attempts at updating to 10.5.2 for Leopard, I finally got it working.  I'm fully updated with 10.5.2, the Graphics Update, and Aperture 2 now.  I've really lucked out with Ruri; it seems from reading the forums over at InsanelyMac.com that the Presario c714NR is the perfect laptop for Leopard.  The upgraded versions of this laptop (the ones that have come out since I got mine) have changed a few things hardware wise and don't work as well.  I'm still having my issue with audio where I can't use the headphone/mic jacks, but that's nothing more than a minor annoyance.  

I've installed the programs that I need to make my laptop work for my job too; they send us XP laptops to do photo-editing with, and we're supposed to only use those to do said edits.  Since we shoot in a RAW format (Canon's CR2 to be exact), we have to use Canon Photo Professional to do our "edits" (it's really just rotating the pictures, reordering them when needed, and deleting bad frames).  Leopard has built-in support for RAW format, but I couldn't rotate the pictures.  It took a while, but I tracked down a copy of Photo Professional, so I can do my edits on my own lappy without them knowing.  While that sounds like a minor (if not insignificant) accomplishment, it means I can carry my own laptop around with me to do my work without having to lug an extra laptop bag.  I also needed support for burning a DVD-RW in reburnable format, so I tracked down BurnAgain DVD.  Even Toast can't do an RW right, so if you're looking for an RW solution for Mac OS, check out BurnAgain.  Well worth the money, in my opinion.  

So, after a few weeks of using Mac OS X exclusively, what is the #1 feature for me?  Hands down, Time Machine.  It has saved me countless times and allowed me to experiment with updates, drivers, and kernels with losing nothing more than the time it takes to restore.  This is the best backup solution I've ever used, and I've used a lot in the past.  I have a 120 GB external hard drive dedicated for it and that seems to be adequate for me (my internal drive is 120 GB too with 50 GB free).  Not to mention, it's got a pretty slick interface.  lol

Do I have any regrets about nuking Vista?  Nope.  Gaming is fun, but hardly worth the hassle when it comes to Windows.  Windows is slow and takes up way too much room; I'm running a comparable setup, application wise, under Leopard that I did under Vista and I have WAY more room (like 40 extra GB) over what I did with Vista.  Will I ever go back to Windows?  Probably not seeing as how I know I can get a $400 MacBook (with some tweaking).  lol  I love my "Mac".