Getting a 'book, comments?
Okay, this the situation.. (long!)
I want an Apple laptop (my first Mac, but I have a few weeks experience with an iBook). I'm going to use it for coding, time management, surfing the Web, watching movies. It would be nice if Blizzard RTS games (also whatever one that will be next after WC3) ran smoothly, but gaming is not a must-have.
I need Bluetooth now, Airport Extreme either now or later.
I need to multi-region the optical drive, I have both R1 and R2 disks (link?). DVD burning on the go doesn't seem something I need to do at all. I can buy a cheap PC DVD-R if DVD burning is necessary in general.
I care a lot about screen quality. I've seen current iBooks and 1GHz 12" Powerbooks and the viewing angle was not such that I'd like to use them for 8 hours in a row. The 15" PB looked a lot better.
The rational choice would seem to be:
15" PB combo base model
256MB DDR (planning to get an aftermarket 512MB 333MHz SO-DIMM for 115e to up this to 768MB
no Applecare (450e seems too expensive for two years of warranty. It would probably be better to switch laptops at 11 months... anyway, Applecare can be added later right?)
regular keyboard (I don't look at the keyboard at all)
2.194,78 euro (there isn't a hard limit, but this is about as high as I'm willing to go.. and the higher up models don't seem to have anything significant to offer)
Comments please?
I want an Apple laptop (my first Mac, but I have a few weeks experience with an iBook). I'm going to use it for coding, time management, surfing the Web, watching movies. It would be nice if Blizzard RTS games (also whatever one that will be next after WC3) ran smoothly, but gaming is not a must-have.
I need Bluetooth now, Airport Extreme either now or later.
I need to multi-region the optical drive, I have both R1 and R2 disks (link?). DVD burning on the go doesn't seem something I need to do at all. I can buy a cheap PC DVD-R if DVD burning is necessary in general.
I care a lot about screen quality. I've seen current iBooks and 1GHz 12" Powerbooks and the viewing angle was not such that I'd like to use them for 8 hours in a row. The 15" PB looked a lot better.
The rational choice would seem to be:
15" PB combo base model
256MB DDR (planning to get an aftermarket 512MB 333MHz SO-DIMM for 115e to up this to 768MB
no Applecare (450e seems too expensive for two years of warranty. It would probably be better to switch laptops at 11 months... anyway, Applecare can be added later right?)
regular keyboard (I don't look at the keyboard at all)
2.194,78 euro (there isn't a hard limit, but this is about as high as I'm willing to go.. and the higher up models don't seem to have anything significant to offer)
Comments please?
Comments
Originally posted by Gon
I need to multi-region the optical drive, I have both R1 and R2 disks (link?). DVD burning on the go doesn't seem something I need to do at all. I can buy a cheap PC DVD-R if DVD burning is necessary in general.
We have region 1 and 2 (and 4 ) DVDs as well, so same issue.
Don't use the firmware patch to multi-region your Powerbook. It would void your warranty - after that you'd pay 100 $ only to have them have a look, even when you'd still have 728 days of (=EU 24 months) warrabty left. You really don't want that.
If you need to *work* on the *movie* dvds with your computer, buy an external DVD burner and set its region to the region you use less. If most of your DVDs are 2, set your Powerbook to region 2, and the external reader/burner to region 1, or vice versa.
If you have no need for working on the movie DVDs and you only want to *see* the movies, set it to the region you use most and keep it there. And for any other region movie get a world DVD player. In UK Amazon.co.uk sells them from like 30 £ up (free shipping to UK addresses), in US one alternative (instead of amazon.com which does not sell them anymore) could be e.g. www.dvdoverseas.com (100 $ brings you a good one).
If you buy your laptop in Europe (= EU, excluding Finland???) you will get 24 months of warranty.
The model you look seems perfect for you. Get more RAM already. 512 MB more could do it.
I would reconsider Applecare. I'm not all for it either, but laptops will be subject to a lot more wear and tear than desktops, especially if you will be using this all the time.
Just my 2 cents... err... I can't convert that to euro...
-ipod
Originally posted by ipodandimac
I would reconsider Applecare. I'm not all for it either, but laptops will be subject to a lot more wear and tear than desktops, especially if you will be using this all the time.
Or wait until Apple's factory warranty is just about to run out... THEN buy AppleCare. I've heard of many people doing this with no troubles at all. The new coverage starts the day you buy it.
- noted lack of faulty pixels in display
- installed OS X, everything from Software Update
- filled battery to full capacity, then drained it, then filled it again (straight from the instruction booklet)
- installed Mozilla
- configured Mozilla and iTunes, happily iTunes then found some music shares on the local campus network, my old PC with the music cannot go on network since the PB has its IP address.
- installed Poisoned, Azureus and DC mainly for future use
- played around with Griffin PowerMate, which I got with the PB. Doesn't seem all that useful.
- something killed sound, entirely. Reboot fixed problem. After reboot, Powermate appeared to be sleeping by itself, glowing and not reacting to manipulation. This got fixed by unplugging and replugging it.
- filled Address Book by syncing from my T68
- downloaded UT2004 demo and tried it for an hour. Surprisingly slow even at low res and detail. I expected better from the Mobility Radeon 9700. Not a big deal, since this machine is not for gaming.
Tomorrow I think I'll go on with the installs. Apple developer tools, X11, Fink are prime candidates. More importantly, I need to consider the alternatives for getting the old PC back on the network so the computers can talk to each other. I might pick up a cheap 802.11g station with a four port switch, and have it do NAT, or just buy a new fixed IP from the network administration. Long term plan is to have the PC act as a firewall and a WLAN base station, but this will take time to set up as I'm not much of an Unix hacker.