Need help with basics

[DaveP924]

Hello,

I was hoping you guys could give me some advise. I have been looking at slowly moving to the mac for awhile. I really like the MacBook as a nice way to dip my toes in the water. I'm looking at the standard machine and was wondering what kind of RAM and HD space do I need in the "real world".

The machine will be used for general web surfing, Powerpoint presentations, photo editing, Itunes and to download and edit video off my sons video recorder. Not really into games.

Looking to keep the costs "reasonable". Help me spec it out. I was looking at the model with the superdrive and a 60 gb hd. The apple store said they can upgrade the ram to 1Gb for $100. Is this going to be enough and is a 60gb hd big enough.

Thanks,
Dave

 

[emptyCup]

I think for what you plan to do 1 GB will be enough. While I've seen posts claiming that you can get a 2 GB upgrade somewhere for $159, the popular dealers like Crucial charge more than Apple's $100.

If you need to keep costs as low as possible, and you do not plan to store a huge amount of music or video on the machine, go with the 60 GB drive and add an external drive later. It is always good to have an external drive for back ups.

Best wishes

 

[funkychunkz]

A good rule for disk space is get as much as you can possibly reason for. A good estimate is about 7 gigs for bare OS install, 4 for fairly basic apps, 2-3 for lots of photos, 5-10 for over 2000 songs, and the rest is used for extra apps and docs (storage).

So that's 20- 25 gigs already. The real question is how much storage will you need, or could make use of? Old photos, documents and videos can go on optical media. To put into perspective, my user account (which is used heavily and I have 350+ apps, and a few full sized games) is around 32 gigs.

Therefor, as a (single?) user, you should be safe with 60, but I think a normal user could easily justify a 80 gig (having free space speeds things up, VM, cache etc.) with only a few years use.

As for RAM, apple doesn't always have the best RAM or prices and installing your own won't void ur waranty. 1GB should be good, you could always buy more if you wanted to get into gaming, or some other hobby.

 

[fatties]

i think you should get a big hard drive too. i think i am pretty normal but i've already used 42gig of my hard drive which leaves me with 18 left? guess i will have to tippex my freecom classic external white and bring it with me everywhere soon! and how terrible will that be?