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Having been a Mac owner for 6 months (wow!), I am still extremely pleased with the Macbook Pro and have found no shortcomings mainly because I can run Windows in Parallels. I have no doubt had stability issues - and the occassional freezing. I dont expect to see a fully stable Operating System in the near future since they dont have the artificial intelligence to figure out when to quit a process or give priority to another. Despite all the flak that Windows receives, I still miss the CTRL+ALT+DEL and the nice task manager or process explorer (by Sysinternals) and the Blue Screen of Death. There are times when I would rather see the BSOD rather than having to give the mac a hard reboot…. well maybe not. Mac has an activity monitor that is similar to the task manager and also has “Opt+Cmd+Q” to force quit any application. However, there are times when it doesn’t work. Also, I have had days where I believe Parallels is the cause of the crash.
So, that brings me to my subject - I was watching Tekzilla and Patrick was talking about the Macbook EFI firmware update fixing a lot of his issues. So, I hunted for the latest Macbook Pro EFI firmware update and downloaded and installed it. I was pretty sure I had gone through the same process from the automatic update but don’t remember the version number or it helping at all. I installed the Macbook Pro EFI firmware update 1.5.1 released on April 21st and it showed a pop-up window with some instructions that I chose to ignore just like I do with any other application or gadget that I use. I prefer to learn by trying like most other geeks out there and I get my thrills when I discover a feature I didn’t know existed after a few minutes/hours/days/weeks/months of usage. After the computer shut down and I restarted it, I noticed the pop-up window for the EFI firmware update again and actually decided to read it and noticed that I had to press and hold the Power button after the shut down till the sleep indicator flashes rapidly or the laptop beeps loudly in order for the firmware update to take place. Am I glad I finally decided to read the manual and actually install the update. I am hoping this update will fix all the issues I have been having since I dont think any of my previous firmware update downloads actually got installed since I never read the instructions before.
I also tried searching for “how do i find my current efi firmware version” and “macbook pro efi firmware version” but couldn’t find any information on how to get that. So, if anyone finds out how, please do leave a comment. Well I just searched again and apparently you look at the Boot ROM version in the System Profiler
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbookproefifirmwareupdate151.html
And for all the dummies who prefer not to read instructions - read them when it comes to a Mac. Apple only gives useful instructions since all the other updates work smoothly and without any user interruptions unlike Windows which forces you to update your “Windows update” software three times, followed by the “Validation tool” download and 7 warnings before you can actually update your machine.
