I bought my Dell Latitude CSX three and a half years ago secondhand from Morgan Computers. It's bulletproof, got a great screen in terms of clarity (an old flatmates brand new acer had a shoddy-at-best screen, but I've only seen one acer laptop, and that was it). It runs Windows
2000 and beleive it or not, it has never crashed. I added a belkin wireless PC card thing and now it has wifi. Brilliant. All in, it's cost about =A3500 or so.
I'd say go secondhand on whatever model you buy, they will all pretty much do everything you want for a lower level of wallet trauma.
I had about 6 laptops in a year, (stuck in bed with a pressure sore) and needed something I can work with, or go bankrupt. One by one they all got sold and replaced. (eBAY) Until I came across a 1920 resolution x black sony! Its the best laptop screen ever. Its as good as my HP trinitron 21 inch monitor. The reflection bit I cant say I ever notice. The contrast and contrast ratio I certainly do. The pure blacks, and brightness and fine detail is amazing. No other type of laptop screen comes close for photo, or website building stuff. Or watching divx movies etc. And it has a much wider viewing angle than the dells hp etc. I tried them all.
These Sonys are expensive though, but thats the reason.
Mines a bit big as laptops go, (17 wide screen) but I need the real estate, and a battery saving 2.0 centrino setup with 1gb mem +100gb fast hard drive etc. My "my documents" folder is all web building stuff and source code etc(no movies or photos) is 30gb alone! It paid for itself several times over so far.
If it's running Panther, then I'd be looking at hardware failure or big-time user f*ck-up. As in so big it could only have been done by someone who thinks they know what they're doing but don't, IYSWIM.
My previous laptop was running Panther as is my print / fax / webserver in the spare room - uptime on the server is 3 months, but it's due an OS upgrade and reboot next time I can be arsed.
Panther and Tiger are the most stable home-user OSs ever, not just IME either.
I wonder if Depresion has confused a badly written application throwing up an unexpected error with an OS crash? - something I haven't seen for around 3 years.
to be fair, I got the iRiver because at the time iPoo didn't act as mass storage (needed itunes installed to store files) and I use it a lot for transferring files, and iPoo still doesn't have a decent recording facility.
It's out of the box, and not the only Mac I have but the most reliable. The Idea that Macs are more reliable than PCs is a myth and has been since Win 2K.
Well, lessee. I've got 4 modern Macs, have owned well over a hundred, and have also owned at least 30 PCs.
Tell me when you've got the same experience, because whilst I feel Win2K isn't the worst OS in the world, the idea that it is more stable than Panther is laughable.
Are you using cheap RAM?
I have encountered one program that crashed my Mac in the past 3 years. Pocket Mac Pro, allegedly an alternative to Missing Sync to connect Windows Mobile devices. It actually kernel panicked my eMac and 'froze' when running on the G5 (so I had to force quit; didn't bring the OS down). That is a festering turd of an application and when it does work, it doesn't do what it claims.
But I have run Classic Apps from several years ago on my Tiger G5 without issue (it's the only way SoundDiver will behave itself), all sorts of beta, shareware, demos and broken stuff. NOTHING that has managed to bring the system down.
OK I only have the 2 Macs and half a dozen PCs at the moment but I've worked with both for over a decade (in large numbers). Somthing tells me I won't buy another mac for a few years when I fall for the Mac fanboys "Oh things have changed" line.
In my expereance your very wrong.
Posibly, it's the Ram Apple shiped it with, I've not opend the case.
You don't get both at the same time. The cheap Dell PCs come with a 90day RTB warranty if you want them at ad prices.
End, wrong, stick, grabbed. The pictures shows that, but go into the pricing of the thing, and you need to spec it with a CRT screen, slower CPU, smaller HDD etc. to get to that price. And then it's plus VAT and delivery.
Things have changed. Things changed in 2001 when OS X started shipping.
I've been using computers since 1979, PCs since 1986 (IIRC), Macs since
1984 (including Lisa), RISC OS since 1988... I used to network these systems for fun.
In 1998 I got so sick of Mac OS freezing and the ever increasing performance of PCs - eventually overtaking the Mac - that I went over to a PC for my main computer, a £4,000 Dell Precision 410 running NT. NT was stable and impressed me. So I moved to 2K and upgraded to dual PIIIs and a 64Mb card as things moved on.
Meanwhile, I replaced the Atari Falcon I was using for music with an iMac. And it didn't crash, and worked well, and was silent. So I got a G4 so I could use a PCI audio card, and the G4 came with OS X.
About the same time, the Win2K machine's registry was reaching a state of total chaos due to the amount of hardware/software I had to review. Attempts to recover the system were not easy or 100%. I got a G5. Then I replaced the PC with an eMac and got an iBook.
OS X is MUCH better than Windows XP or 2000. OS X is much better than previous Mac OS.
Then you are doing something wrong with the Macs. I'm not making an idle boast, I strongly suspect I know considerably more than you do about PCs and Macs and their relative merits, and I am not an Apple fanboy by any means - beyond recognising that OS X is the superior OS.
What model of Mac? I'm guessing 256Mb RAM as standard. The Apple RAM should be fine unless it's an older machne and the RAM is simply failing (again, that shouldn't be an issue - my G3 is 8 years old, I'm using some 16 year old machines for various network tweakery and routing).
Tee hee. In 1998 I started a new job and got a new machine with it. I think it cost 300 quid - maybe 400. It's a bit slow these days, but still usable...
Yep, the Dell is still useable, still running Win 2K (on a clean 18Gb drive), still being used for the tasks a Mac can't do - specifically installing non CAB packaged applications for the iPaq, writing tapes for old computers from Binary files.
I didn't pay £4K for it. It just had a cost of that much.
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