I'm heading to college in California and I am going to need the best laptop there is today. I can't decide between Alienware and Mac. Which would be the best one? I need to use the Laptop for everything. P2P, Modding for my gaming consoles, Video Games, homework, pictures, movies, animation (like 3dstudio max), etc. etc. I went to a Mac store and I found out about Windows running on Macs (and its not with the slow slow virtual pc. I know it's still in Beta stage). So I like how the mac looks and feels and how blazing fast they are and how they can run on windows. But PC's cant run mac OS. I can't decide. And it's really hard for me with people have such strong sides with windows or with mac's. I dont want to get the wrong one and then regret it for years. If it helps, ive never had a mac before and have always had a PC ever since, well ever.
I will break it down for you very easy: Windows Laptop vs Apple MacBookPro(Get the INTEL ONLY) Virus/Spam No Virus/Spam Recent Games 5 Year Old Games from Windows Ugly Beautiful Cheap Expensive If you got the money Get the Apple MacBookPro or for a desktop get a Mac Mini
Interesting. Thanks for the info. But now that windows can run on Macs, cant I run the PC games on it now with the newest Intel Mac Notebook (2.16 ghz 2GB Ram, etc.)
read about Apple BootCamp (google it) and i think it is just seperate partitions but i dont know. I know that XP is not slipstreamed into OSX.
It is a separate boot. When you start up the notebook the screen shows 2 hard drives to click on, mac OS or windows xp. I saw it as I was at the mac store.
I believe everyone, and I do mean everyone....would benefit greatly if they would spend some time with other operating systems. There are benefits to knowing each system.
Ah thanks for letting me know. Linux? Well the only time I ever used linux was when it wasnt for free and I bought it at a computer store and it came with a desktop penguin you could squeeze. lol. I havent tried it since. But when I bought it, I called support and I wanted to install a game and I had to type out literally like 50 pages of code to tell the computer to load the CD. But I have been told that has completely changed now. Hahaha. But again, thanks for letting me know about linux running on it also.
For the record, linux has always been free--that's part of the benefit of it, however buying commercial distributions has always and still does cost money, but in most cases what you get when you pay is some degree of support. Linux has some major strengths...but I wouldn't recommend running from a partition if you don't have to, booting mepis or linspire would be plenty, and you won't void your chances at support from the laptop manufacturer by running it, like you would if you repartitioned the hdd. As for power book versus x brand intel notebook, there's really no choice here unless someones giving away free powerbooks. Unless you plan on going into the publishing industry and need to get REAL good REAL fast w/ some apple-only program options, I wouldn't recommend it. You're never going to have modern, up-to-date games for your laptop, but then the cost associated w/ being able to play, say, COD2 on a laptop REALLY WELL are astronomical. I'm not sure why you think you need a laptop, but examine that decision. I got a cutting edge laptop when I was 17, in 1997, and that sucker STILL sells for around $350 on ebay, lol. At the time, it cost $3,400. However, to get a really, REALLY great laptop you're still going to spend 3x what you would on a comparable desktop, and most universities have laptop checkouts to students for libraries, that sort of thing. As a student, get a PC. If you're going into filmmaking or something...consider a mac. Even if you're thinking about filmaking, get a PC, because there's kickass software for PC's these days. And, in case you didn't know, the Mac OS is just a BSD OS w/ a logo on it, which is where the stability comes from. However, if you know what you're doing, the "blazing fast" idea comes more from settings and less from the out of the box package from either OS. My 2.8ghz prescott outperforms lots of people w/ 64 bit 949 chipset systems, and it's all about system tweaking. Maybe you're rich, and cost doesn't matter, or maybe you have something like a $5,000 purse to spend...either way, you'll get WAY more bang for your buck w/ a desktop PC. Heck, for $2000, you could have close to a terabyte of hdd, a couple gigs of very high speed ram, a very nice chip and mobo, and a supersexy video card. Match that w/ a laptop, I dare ya. Oh, and ask the Apple store when they're going to start shipping blu-ray or HD-DVD drives if you want to know how fast your system is going to be redundant. edit: I wrote $200 instead of $2000
mepis or linspire? whats that? And shoot, you may have changed my mind. Ahhh I can't deside. Cost is not a problem but differences between both PC and mac are. I don't know now what to do. Both seem fantastic.
They are flavors of linux It all depends on what you are doing with it...... PC's are mediocore for everything Mac's are more for Editing and use a different file system...And you can't really upgrade it either
More specifically, Mepis and Linspire are flavors of linux that boot straight from CD and load into RAM, so they take no HDD to run. They autoconfigure your LAN/Display/sound and give you a nice graphical interface. KDE, I believe. They give you everything you NEED, and some things you don't. There are also versions, I think Mepis does it now, that run off Flash Drives, which is cool because you can take your entire OS with you, it all fits on like a 256 w/ room to spare...and it includes Star Office, etc. I wouldn't say PC's are mediocre for everything, but mac's have become specifically designed for graphic/video editing on a large scale. Don't think though that places like DreamWorks use Mac's, they have Solaris server farms that use distributed arrays. There was a time when Pixar (yes, owned @ that time by Apple, I know) had the most powerful distributed array in the world, and it was @ their graphics lab. But I digress. You're going to eventually hit a wall with new things you can do with your Mac. That day will either NOT come w/ a PC, or it will come much, much later. Beyond that, Apple's has some horrendous design flaws in some of its last few series of systems, I don't tend to trust them. Good luck!
