OT: Computery-related stuff (firefox and wireless related)

Quote:

Brazen test post. Hi :-)

Reply to
DanB
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Hello! (posted from an ageing PC....)

Tbh whilst this PC is ancient, it's only starting to flag a bit these days, thanks to me watching a fair bit of streaming video, and using facebook (quite flash heavy) a fair bit. If I'm not stupid in terms of the amount of stuff I load up, it still manages everything I want to do.

Though I'll probably get something decent to replace it soon. Was chatting to someone who builds them for a living (amongst other IT related things) and reckons he could more or less compete with Dell type prices for desktops, but use better components to allow better upgradeability. And yes, it might be slightly more than an equivalent Dell if I'm getting the potential to up the RAM to, say, 32GB rather than 4GB etc etc, but it'll be worth paying a bit extra IMHO.

Reply to
AstraVanMann

This machine is 15 years old and still works fine for most of the things I use it for - newsgroups and email, word processor and drawing prog. Plus accounts and various databases. Have a modern PC for AV stuff and browsing - that's where the older machines fall over or take too long.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

The premier pro edit system, Avid, is now PC rather than Mac based.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Dells used to be good, as did Viaos.

Then the idea of cheap contract manufacturing came in, along with unreliable and noisy macbooks, crap dells, brittle Tosh Satellites, HPs that desolder their own chips (and I believe some dells are doing this too) and unreliable low end Vaios.

Pretty much all the sub 500 quid laptops are much of a muchness build wise, only Acer are anything different. Spend proper money (800+) and you get into the real works of engineering - Portege / Tecra, HP Business, the boutique Viaos, all very good indeed.

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

Which is where the Powerbooks sit, really.

Macbooks after revision 1 are fine, too.

But you should never buy the first release of anything..... I did, but only because it was at a 300 quid discount over a new one.

Reply to
SteveH

In fact there are only two reasons I can think of for owning a Mac, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro - two tools which are easier to get good results with than the PC equivalents.

Everything else is turning or has turned PC. As you point out Avid has gone PC, Protools has gone PC, Premiere and Vegas are PC. Photoshop etc, all PC.

In fact just checked (as not looked for ages) and Quark and Indesign have also kept with PC based stuff too!

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

Whilst some stuff that was Mac only is now available on both platforms (no doubt aided by the Apple transition to Intel processors) - there are significant advantages in running the Mac versions - namely the OS and its stability / ease of use.

Reply to
SteveH

I agree, that's why I chose the XPS laptops as they're very well made, and very sturdy. I agree most of the Dells are quite cheaply made but that's because they are cheap. Not all Dells are poorly made though, this Latitude D410 for example has a magnesium alloy chassis for strength and lightness.

Besides, it's not as if it was just a small difference in spec, I mean, the XPS has double the RAM, far more than double the GFX power (1 of the 8800gtx is miles better than the 8600gt, and there is two, and a pci physics unit, probably 4 times the gfx power at least), a lot more hard drive space, with faster drives, a better screen (with a 2 mega pixal webcam built in as well), a better warranty with onsite support and you can choose the colour you want as well :-)

Reply to
DanB

But for most people Windows is stable, and very easy to use. The only people that have problems are Mac owners heh. I tried to post this using my iPhone but whenever I hit send, it did the common crash where it just flicks to the home screen. D'oh, bloody Apple OS heh. (it might not be an Apple OS, I have no idea, and I was running a none-Apple app on it as well, it was just a joke)

Reply to
DanB

Except that there isn't. I have a HP workstation running Premiere, and an Intel motherboarded PC also running Premiere. They don't crash, sometimes Premiere gets a bit on top of itself but they're fast, reliable and easy to use, and more people are familiar with Windows and its methods than OSX.

I use both, the Mac purely for Logic. Software is the driver, part of me was tempted to make the second edit unit Final Cut Pro on a Mac Pro but when you added up the numbers it made no financial sense at all. I have clients with rooms full of PCs running multiple apps simultaneously, heavy ones like Microvellum, Solidworx and Inventor, and they don't crash either.

Maybe the main problem is that people think a PC costs 249 (inc vat, monitor and Vista) from Asda, and then wonder why it struggles to run outlook, autocad and photoshop at the same time...

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

In a pro environment the basic operating system matters little since it will only be running the one prog.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

(Obviously, we're talking about MacBook Pros here, I'd forgotten the Powerbook name had been dropped)

RAM is cheap as chips to add these days, and OSX is better at managing the memory it has than Windows, so that's a non-issue.

2mp webcams are purely pissing contests, just as mobile camera pixel counts are - and most people wouldn't have the bandwidth to make full use of 2mp anyway.

No idea about the 'physics unit' as I don't know what you're want one or need one, but you're also forgetting a very big thing here - the MacBook Pro is a T9500 rather than T9300 processor, which adds £160 to the dell cost.

Hard drive space is another red herring in the mix, as, once again, OSX isn't anywhere near as 'needy' as Vista.

I don't know what the weight is of the Dell or the battery life. I'd suspect they're about the same weight, but the MacBook will have better battery life by a significant margin.

It's ultimately about personal preferences, but most people who slate Macs have never really used one, so just accept that Windows, despite its numerous faults, is the default choice - no doubt aided by PC salesmen and the urban myth spread by non-users that 'Macs are crap'.

Reply to
SteveH

Whilst that may be true, the programs you run may not be so magnificent, also you'd have to buy a full 4gb as you only have 2 slots and they're both full with a 1gb sticks. It can be done for £120 to upgrade on the Mac site.

Well, it has 'a webcam' so you can video chat on MSN (on the PC anyway, does Mac MSN support webcams yet?) without carrying an extra accessory if you so desire.

I'm forgetting no 'very big thing' - the Macbook for £1,799 has the 2.5ghz chip, you can add the 2.6ghz (T9500) chip for £160. So they're actually the same, both have the T9300 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo. And the physics unit is a gaming thing primarily, imagine it as like a graphics card booster, they don't really do anything though heh - the different is more from the fact the 8800gtx is a lot better than the 8600, and also, there is 2 8800gtxs heh.

Vista doesn't take 70gb of space heh.

Well neither of them are going to be any good battery life wise, the XPS has a 9 cell and reviews are saying anywhere between 1 1/2 and 2 hours on the standard battery are to be expected - which is actually a lot better than I expected heh, especially from something so powerful with 2 GFX cards. Macworld.com suggests up to 3 hours for the Macbook, again better than I thought. But as these 17" laptop are such beasts anyway they;ll both doubtlessly spend most of their time plugged in. XPS is about a kg heavier than the Macbook as well, but as I say, they're very sturdy next to all the other Dells heh. You wouldn't exactly buy either of them though if you were going to be moving them around a lot and carrying them with you. Shame you can't spec a 15" XPS to that power really heh.

Absolutely, I was just suggesting that the problem for me with Macs is the price of the hardware, as I could never bring myself to spend £1,800 on a Macbook for example when the £1,800 equivalent XPS would give me so much more spec.

The problem with the XPS is I'd get into the old "Well if I'm spending nearly 2 grand anyway... and it'd get some more upgrades as well... Then suddenly it'd be £2,800.

Reply to
DanB

But you wouldn't buy memory from Apple. You'd get it from Crucial or similar. But, honestly, you probably wouldn't need it.

Erm, the MacBook Pro has a webcam. And yes, you can do video chat on MSN, just not with the MS client.

OK, didn't know the differences, just knew the MacBook could be had with the T9500, assumed it came in different clock speeds.

As for the GFX stuff, great if you're a games player, but who buys a MacBook for gaming? - in fact, who buys any 'pro' laptop for gaming?

Not just the original install, but everything else. OSX and its applications are *much* more drive space efficient.

And you've hit the nail on the head as to why the MacBook is a slightly lower spec for the same money - it's actually a usable laptop, being lighter and having *double* the battery life.

Apple don't go for big power headline figures - they tend to go for usability. What's the point in a massively heavy laptop that dies after

1.5 hours?

It's not as if you'd keep an £1800 laptop on the coffee table for browsing and stuff, either. If your laptop is heavy and with short battery life, you may as well have a significantly cheaper desktop.

You're missing the point - the MacBook Pro is (just) usable as a working laptop. The XPS is pretty much a deskbound machine. If you want portability, you have to pay for it.

Reply to
SteveH

Awesome :-) I think it is clear we're not going to agree heh. I think you'd be mad to get a 17" of anything, if you were ever planning on taking it anywhere, I can't stand 17" laptops - you may as well just get a desktop.

I was merely showing the Mac hardware was very expensive - as you could get a lot more of the same qualty components, for the same money if you had a PC.

The Mac uses most of the same stuff as the Dell, CPU, RAM, Hard drives etc, if you configure the Dell to a similar spec of the Apple it will get similar battery life - but cost several hundred quid less. Reviews for other M1730s show up to 4 hours on the older, none-SLI gfx ones - but they had a slightly less powerful CPU. Still powerful GFX, 4gb Ram etc though.

Or if you keep the costs the same, if you really want you can crack a copy of OSX onto the Dell[1] - then you'd have the worlds greatest OS, on a more powerful machine - then you'd be happy both ways :) Or if you reduce the spec of Dell to that of the Mac, then put OSX on, you'd have the same thing - but also several hundred quid in your pocket.

Or would this defeat the point because then no one would know you preferred Macs ;-)

[1] I have no idea if this is possible but please, don't elaborate on it, we've wasted enough bandwidth on an un-endable argument.
Reply to
DanB

Better still the 13", I'm more than happy with my 12.1 inchis (Err can I sat that?)

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Why settle for less.

Reply to
Depresion

Sitting on the sofa as I write this, I think I can point out that laptops with no battery life can in fact be pretty darn useful. You can get mains in an awful lot of places - although I've got the extra battery pack for mine, and that's been quite useful a couple of times on holiday, for nearly everything I've done a 30 minute battery would actually be fine. And yes, I've done the carting the desktop around thing - caused much amusement, and it was worthwhile for that, but the laptop is so much less hassle...

(ok, this is an HP business machine, it's not massively cheap, expensive, light, heavy, powerful, slow, great on battery, crap on battery - very boringly goldilocks-y, and I have just read "The Fourth Bear". But I'm generally pretty pleased with the thing.)

Of course Dan loses for not just saying "hook, line and sinker" to your first reply - that was more than just a bite, that was seeing the bait and jumping right out into the fisherman's hands, saying "yes please, do whatever you want to me right here and now" :-)

cheers, clive

Reply to
Clive George

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I have been perilously close to ordering an Alienware 15.4" beast. I'm one of those people who likes to buy stuff to cheer themselves up, the amount I spend is directly proportionate to how sad I'm feeling. The laptop I specced was £2,800... If I only I could spec a 15.4" XPS with a 8800GTX :'(

Reply to
DanB

Ram on Windows is a non-issue. I've just ordered two Windows boxes with 8 cores and 16 gig of ram...

Mainly because there's less available software to install...

Leopard lists 9gig available hard drive required for installation. Vista needs 15gig.

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

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