Morgan Stanley entered a joint venture agreement with Citi to acquire the Smith Barney unit and the merger has had plenty of bumps including longer than expected technology integration.

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Under the hood, there's been spec bumps galore, including faster CPUs for both (up to 2.8GHz for the MacBook Pros, up to 2.4GHz for the MacBooks), DDR3 RAM is now in play with both systems, and on the Pro you'll get that pair of NVIDIA graphics chips, the GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT.

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However, he says he has faced a few bumps so far, including a weaker-than-expected business-lunch crowd, mainly due to the slightly isolated location.

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There have been some bumps along the way, including a second cancer scare for Backus, this one involving his prostate.

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