MacBook arriving monday

Ok, so i'm getting my first mac on Monday, a 2ghz macbook w/ 2gb ram.

The machine is part of my plan to build a mobile audio recording set-up for bands and such like. My set-up at home is an external firewire soundcard (alesis multimix 8 fw) and a 19" monitor along with two 320gb hdd's for recordings.

Just a few questions, at home the mac will be treated as a desktop mostly, will be running through my monitor and using my new bluetooth mac kb, is this damaging to the battery life?

Are the two USB hubs shared or separate from each other (bandwidth-wise)?

Is there anyway to have the macbook detect my 19" monitor and switch to it's native res when plugged in, and then switch to the comp's own native res when unplugged, automatically?

Also, any suggested essential apps, i've discovered QuickSilver so far, any other gems?

Thanks for any advice and help, can't wait to receive it.

Lou

lou said:

Also, any suggested essential apps, i've discovered QuickSilver so far, any other gems?

Click to expand...

Welcome to the forums!
All you really need to know about what the best-rated and "essential" apps can be found in this thread:
Mac-Forums.com: A switcher's guide to OS X Software Thread

Looks good, thanks for teh speedy reply.

SUppose i shoudl mention my mac background. Been using my gf's 1st gen mac mini for a while so somewhat acquainted with os x. Been a Linux user for about 4 years, although i recently switched back to XP solely for Cubase. Was a maintainer for Arch Linux a while back (KDE) so know a fair bit about the underlying OS.

Really excited about getting a unix-based comp which just works, what i've been looking for for so long.

How do you like the alesis multimix 8 fw? Welcome to the Forums! Congrats on the purchase..!! It is a great computer!

The multimix is a good little device, had some issues in XP with it when restart the comp but hope those will be gone in OS X.

Really looking forward to OS X, will be able to use iTunes without it crashing every 10 mins like in XP!