I'm trying very hard to decide between the midranged Macbook vs the Blackbook. For those who own the 120gb Midrange, do you feel the HD capacity is enough for all of your stuff? What programs or other OSes do you load on your Macbook along with music + video + other multimedia and how much space do you have remaining? Personally, I want to avoid upgrading the HD later on down the line. I personally would like to load WinXP with bootcamp for times that I may need a Microsoft OS...how much of a partition should be enough? Thanks.
I bought an original MacBook with a 60GB at a retail Apple Store -- the higher end white one. Upgraded RAM almost immediately and then to a 120GB drive, easily installed myself and I'm no technician, within a month. About 110GB usable capacity. Running Leopard now. I keep about 25GB of media, mostly ripped CDs and iTunes Store music purchases, a bit of video optimized for an iPhone. I'm a writer so my work files are very small; and I use Mellel as my word processor, also small unlike typical office suites. But I need Photoshop once in a while, so it and all its support files are there. Also about 6GB of high-res photos in iPhoto, plus some video clips; but we have small kids so that increases fairly often.
No Windows OS. Various other bits and pieces as needed, though they tend to hang around. Most of my past work, dating back almost two decades, is on the MacBook drive as well as backed up, but again weighing about 400 hundred MB, not GB. 2GB of RAM so the maximum disk usage for RAM. I tend to have a GB or two over 50GB free space at all times.
If you're a regular-issue student, writer, or general email/web user, 120GB is plenty. Any kind of typical business professional, also attorneys or physicians, fine. But if you work with lots of Web design, photo or video editing, even graphic design, you probably want 160GB. Or if you have a large CD collection, as I do, but you also want to keep the whole collection on your MacBook. Or you rip many of your DVD movies to your MacBook and leave them there, not move them off to some sort of external storage when you don't want them with you.