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Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn’t believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That’s with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There’s no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

The way you’d do it in a PC / Windows environment is just to hit the Home or End key.

On the iMac, there are Home and End keys, but they only scroll to the first or last item without moving the cursor to focus on those items.

On the MacBook Pro, you don’t get to have those keys at all.

There’s a workaround I use, but it only works with the Finder in List view.

Next, use the Option key in conjunction with either the Up or Down arrow key.

Say your cursor is currently on the the first item in the Finder window.

To move the cursor to the last item, simply hit Option + Down Arrow.

To move the cursor to the top of the list again, just press Option + Up Arrow.

Rather than clicking on the Apple menu item and then selecting Sleep, Restart or Shut Down with your mouse, all you need to do is the following.

Step 1

Press the Power Button briefly, and then let go. (The photo was shot with a Canon XSi / 450D at ISO 1600 and edited using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and spotlight effect with Skitch).

Step 2

Select the desired option: Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down.

Not for the faint hearted way

And finally, there is a combination that will shut down your Mac without any prompting whatsoever.

Do this only if you’re sure you want to shut down your computer as fast as possible, or you’re in a real hurry to do so.

Any unsaved changes in open applications or running programs will not be saved.

The combination is: control + option (alt) + command + eject (if you’re using a MacBook, pressing the power button instead of eject also works).

The Delete key on the MacBook functions just like the on any other Mac, and that is to delete the character to the left of where your current cursor is.

Sometimes I want to delete what’s on the right of my cursor, and I had been using fn-delete, which is not something I like doing because it involves using both hands.

Good thing I came across Mac Guides – Keyboard shortcuts today, it turns out that I can also use control-d (with my left hand) to accomplish the same thing.

Still not as handy as having separate Backspace and Delete keys like what PC / Windows computers come with, but sure beats having to use both hands to do a simple forward delete.