While traveling home for Christmas, I suddenly got a spur-of-the-moment idea to buy a MacBook Air. I had thought about getting one for quite awhile, so long so that all of my friends jumped on the band-wagon before I could find one in my budget. Well, suddenly my budget was looking pretty flexible as a searched through multiple eBay listings.
I had found many different listings that looked promising, only to have a feature that wasn't what I wanted - an 11" screen instead of a 13" screen, or a 64GB SSD instead of a 128GB SSD. But I did not give up hope! I kept looking through listings until I came across one that met all my requirements, and it was within my budget. The only catch: it was a 2011-model that had some cosmetic wear and minor damage.
After bidding on it and eventually winning the auction, I received the MacBook Air in the mail. It had no accessories, not even a sleeve or original box - it simply came in bubble wrap and a cardboard shipping box. Appropriately for the season, I quickly dispensed of the wrappings like a kid during Christmas. Synchronously, I also opened the Amazon box that contained my replacement charger, and connected it to the half-charged Air. I was up but not yet running.
After downloading and installing a clean copy of OS X Yosemite, installing updates and software, and logging into iCloud, I was not only running, but running faster than I thought possible on a computer that is now three-and-a-half-years-old. This little bugger is fast! It has completely replaced my desktop and my other laptops as most-frequently-used-computer. Mac OS X Yosemite has something to do with this as it is a clean and simple interface that I found readily enjoyable for someone who has long beed a Windows (and sometimes Ubuntu) OS guy.
Speaking of Windows, Boot Camp made it a breeze to install Windows 7 64-bit, and VMware Fusion make it easy to run Windows software when I can't find a Mac alternative. All-in-all, it was a well-spent $450 to upgrade to something older than most of the other computers in my house.
Specs:
- Intel Core i5 1.7GHz CPU
- 13" 1440x900 matte display
- 4GBs of DDR3
- 128GB SSD
- Decent battery... approximately 6-8 hours at minimal usage and dimmed display
Lately I have had a weird problem... My primary computer system will be fast and responsive, like it should be, but randomly it would suddenly slow to a crawl. After opening the Task Manager, I found that my CPU usage was at 100%. That should not be possibly with my system so I knew something was wrong. I was pretty sure it wan't anything system- or driver-related, so I started investigating. In the Task Manager, the Processes tab showed no process that had any CPU usage - as if another process was using 100% of all the CPU resources. Even when I clicked "Show processes from all users," nothing was appearing. After a lot of frustration, I just let it sit there... lo and behold, a process showed up that was using 99% of the CPU! It was called "CaptureLibService.exe" and it was loaded by the SYSTEM.
I researched the process and found that it is installed with the software Freemake Video Downloader. The service is installed and used by Freemake to scan network traffic for embedded videos. This is a very fast method to download those pesky embedded videos, but when the service acts up and consumes all the resources, it isn't worth it.
If you would like to prevent this service from starting up automatically, but you want to keep the software, do the following:
1) Press Start + R to open run dialogue, then type msconifg
2) Click on the Services tab, then click on the Service heading to ascend alphabetically
3) Look for "FreemakeVideoCapture" and uncheck the box to the left
This will prevent it from starting automatically.
