New hardware - Macbook Air
Probably many people have written similar about the Macbook Air: Reading about it is one thing, but holding it in your own hands is really a big surprise because it is so thin and light. Especially in the beginning I (Andreas) was worried to break it in two, but so far it is in one piece!
To be specific, the machine we've got is the standard version with 1.6 GHz CPU. Since we don't plan to use it as part of our core network that should be enough horsepower. Rather, we will use it as a client device in various scenarios and as a travel companion when necessary.
We had some trouble setting up Time Machine to use our new NAS device (more about the Synology NAS later) for storage of the backups. After we Google'd around a bit we found some helpful posts. First, support for using external disk drives must be enabled in OSX:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Next, because Apple did some changes to OSX (and possibly later, to be tried) it still won't work. It seems like it works, because Time Machine will create files on the network drive but after some time it stops with the message "The backup image could not be created". Sounds very strange since it seems to successfully create it. That is probably one reason why Apple does not officially support this configuration (the root reason might be that they would like us to buy the Apple Time Capsule instead of using other vendor's products).
Anyhow, Johnny Chadda seems like he found a workaround for this. In addition, Kuro5hin has an article describing the problem more in depth and a similar workaround. We have yet to try these workarounds, but hopefully it will finally work.
Then, after playing a little around with OSX the Boot Camp Assistant came handy to install Microsoft Windows Vista on a separate partition. Together with Microsoft Office it works very fine on the laptop. Fortunately, they've added support for using the Apple Remote Control from Windows too now.
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