So I’m thinking of getting a laptop and am hoping some of the nice geeks on the forum can provide some advice. Due to my better half’s profession in design, my home is currently full of Macs: IBook, 2 Powerbooks and IMac. Nothing but great reviews for them all, but everything at work is windows based and my goal is to be a little more mobile in completing tasks so my options are: 1. Buy a PC laptop that is good for general nerdy spreadsheet monkey activities + maybe a blog post here or there. 2. Get one of the Mac laptops to run windows office 2007 (well). any suggestions. If option 1 is better- whats a good choice??
#1 is almost certainly not better but it is cheaper. A nice Mac laptop is > $2000. For > $2000 you can buy a completely maxed out PC laptop with lots more memory, etc. but you just don’t have a Mac. I use Macs but have XP on all of them as well. It’s better but more expensive.
revision: 2. Get one of the Mac laptops **WE ALREADY OWN** to run windows office 2007 (well). Joey- can you suggest a step-by-step to achieve your success?
I use Parallels on my mac and it runs great. No complaints. Every once in a while it can get a little confused if you plug in a USB device, since it doesn’t know whether the mac or the PC is supposed to use it, but there is a menu item that lets you determine which device goes to which machine. If you want to run the PC software natively (i.e. without Parallels), you can do that too, but I find that that 2-3% speed hit is not really noticeable most of the time, but having a huge partition of your hard disk blocked off for PC use is. I have friends that use VMware and they are very happy with that too. I don’t know much about it myself, though. Finally, if you are running Vista, as opposed to XP, there is some aspect of the license that might affect whether you can install it under virtualization processes like Parallels or VMware. I’m sure people have done it though.
nvm
hackintosh
thanks chrismaths! You’ve managed to eloquently resolve all of my issues!!
or EEE 901.
Can’t lose with a Dell. Dell is probably the most widely used laptop in the western world. I’ve had my Latitude D800 for 5 years now and it has worked great. Customer service is much improved in the last several years. My company of 5,600 people almost universally uses Dell, as have my last 2 firms.
kkent Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Can’t lose with a Dell. can’t win much either get a mac, run windows when needing excel and have a windows based keyboard - important for shortcuts
I just bought a MacBook this weekend. Couldn’t resist, Tax-Free Holiday weekend, student discount, and a free ipod touch. I’ve been a PC user forever but Microsoft’s Vista bs turned me away. Dell definitely has the upper hand with businesses though. An ad on the back of a magazine I was reading a minute ago said that 99% of the S&P 500 companies use Dell. Not very surprising.
I prefer a mac, but when I’ve used PC laptops, I’ve been very happy with Dells. I like the design and style of the Sony VAIOs, but I think for that price premium, the hardware should be a little sturdier; VAIOs don’t seem to be able to handle physical jostling of travel as well as Dells do.
I bought a MacBook Pro last year and I love it. I use Bootcamp to run winXP so I have the best of both worlds. If I am doing any business-related activity (Excel, Word, etc) then I will use XP. For everything else, OSX.
akanska Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > revision: > > 2. Get one of the Mac laptops **WE ALREADY OWN** > to run windows office 2007 (well). > > Joey- can you suggest a step-by-step to achieve > your success? Just follow the directions to make a Bootcamp partition and install XP on it. It seems like it would be complicated, but it is really very simple. Then install Office in the Bootcamp partition. The only question it asks you that you might not know the answer to is about FAT32 vs NTFS. I think you should answer NTFS - FAT32 says that you want to be able to access your PC partition files from MAC but your whole system becomes less stable.
Why would anybody want to use that?
Because it means you can access NTFS partitions from OSX. It’s very good. I’ve been using it since it on Linux for ages. It means there is no reason to use FAT32 anymore, so that choice goes away. Just use ntfs.
I think you can buy software from DataViz that will let you read windows partitions from mac. MediaFour has software that definitely lets you read ms partitions from windows, and the might have some sw that let’s you go the other way around.
chrismaths Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Because it means you can access NTFS partitions > from OSX. It’s very good. I’ve been using it since > it on Linux for ages. > > It means there is no reason to use FAT32 anymore, > so that choice goes away. Just use ntfs. Oh - that is cool.
Try to find a student to buy your Mac. Right now I think you’ll get 10% off plus a free Nano. I use Parallels on my Macbook Pro, and it works fine.