Well I'm hesitant to throw a third brand into the mix. I had a bunch of different crappy PCs in the 90's and then I bought my first Dell, and it was my first PC that was of quality build (this was in 2000 mind you, so no comparisons between plastic and cable spaghetti vs. the interior of the current Mac Pro, please... the plastic turqoise G3 machines weren't so pretty on the inside either). I never had a single problem with it. I've stuck with Dell ever since. Their service is pretty hard to beat, and that's important IMO. I've looked at HP but their product line and web site are so confusing it gives me a headache, and those are the only two brands with the kind of service I'm looking for (NBD on-site repairs).hahahah decisions, decisions....
there are more PC brands than Dell, you know? it looks like you want OS X on something other than a Mac. it's tough...
A friend of mine asked for my help in getting her a new laptop. £500 max. I'll do the setting up, so it will feel like a new toy for me
This was the key failure of Vista. Due to the management structure that was in place at the time Vista was developed much of the feedback from the beta phase was ignored in order to speed the product to market. That coupled with quite senior staff micromanaging every detail of the development process (down to icon colour choices) created a monster.
I am surprised they didn't stick a bigger battery in the machine, given its ample size. HP's equivalent, the Elitebook 8730 (with nearly identical specs and form factor) gives you 4-10 hours depending on battery configuration. And Apple shoved an 8-hour battery into the MBP 17". 2 hours (and that's what Dell says in the specs, so make it 1-1½ hours) is bottom of the barrel in this class.You say that as if you were surprised or something. Laptops this big (i.e., notebooks with desktop-grade components) are not very mobile to begin with, and cost more than a desktop you could build yourself with equal or better parts. They all are 10 pounds, 4 inches thick, and have a 2 hour battery life. But they have RAID and 16GB of RAM, oh boy!
My Dell XPS700 actually does have a TI chipset, so there's a good chance they're putting that chip in other machines as well, at least the desktops. And you can always buy a PCI or PCI Express 1394 adapter with the TI chipset on it if all else fails. Unfortunately there's something weird with the XPS700 that makes it useless for Firewire audio no matter if I use the onboard firewire or a PCI card w/ TI chipset. It's fine in XP, but when I run Vista or Win7, no sample buffer/latency setting can stop the audio from crackling, and I've found that it's the graphics in certain audio apps that are doing it. If I minimize the app windows, audio performance is fine. I has a modest NVidia 8600GT so I don't see how it can strangle firewire, but there you go... I've had to resort to using the iMac for audio. Which is lame, as it has the cheapo AGERE chipset, but it's still better than the XPS700. This is the main reason why I wanted to replace the XPS700 with a Mac Pro, I know I'll be getting the TI chipset, but then with the fan control and DPC spike issues in BootCamp it would be just as bad as the XPS700. Unless of course I just run everything in OS X, but I want to use Win7 primarily. Gaaaaaah. All I need, really, is BootCamp 3.0 with fully functional fan control and no weird bottlenecks and buggy drivers, all ambivalence and frustration would disappear and I'd place an order for a MP quad 2.66 and an MBP 17" right this minute.
You're having trouble getting Vista to wake from sleep mode? About half a dozen times over the last couple of years, my Vista laptop has returned from sleep showing only a black screen and a mouse cursor, and I've had to hard reboot. I eventually realized that it only happens when the machine is already asleep and I dock it with the port replicator, when I then open the lid to wake the machine up it apparently doesn't know what planet it's on so it freezes up. Other than that, waking up works as expected every time.
Then why don't you fix it?
The more you post, the more you look like the moron that you are. Pass the Kool Aid, please.
Fair enough.
Yep. I'm not much of an electronics techie but isn't heat the worst battery killer (in terms of total life span, not per-charge life)? I read somewhere that a high temperature in the environment where you charge a Li-Ion battery can seriously cut the number of recharge cycles a battery will handle. And I can think of no hotter place for a battery than the cramped furnace that is an MBP running Vista x64. I would imagine that these bizarre issues with overheating that people are having with BootCamp+Vista on UMBP's, to the point where they start getting random graphics artifacts, are also shortening the lifespan of the battery. The occasionally non-removable-and-ludicrously-expensive-to-replace battery, that is.
M$ has one major disadvantage though, in the fact that the barrage of anti-trust crap from all over the world (Europe in particular) has scared them into removing a lot of software that Windows normally ships with. I know they used ugly tactics against Netscape back in the 90's, but come on, this is getting ridiculous, the OS will be bare naked soon...The most important fact is that both OS is on the right track because everybody is gaining something on both ends. Snow Leopard and Windows 7 will bring a very close battle in a war between Apple and MS and that only benefits the customers because for the first time in recent history, both OS may turn out to be very good and desirable for both sides. It only encourages innovations from both ends for the next OS. W7 has something SL dont? Apple will come up with something better for 10.7, SL has something W7 don't? MS will copy it.
MS lost the battle between Leopard and Vista in the never-ending OS war (until one company goes out of business of course) because Vista did suck in the beginning with horrible drivers support and so on. This resulted into a bigger market share and better company image for Apple. While they are still gaining more people, the question now is can they continue the momentum into the new battle between SL and W7?
Windows 7 is coming back strong and so is Snow leopard. This battle is going to be VERY CLOSE and I honestly think Apple won't win this round easily as it did with Leopard. The economy may push the win over to MS this time, with the W7 running better than XP on netbooks, people are going to want it even though netbooks are still a small market. Combine that with HPTC, slim PCs and low ends PCs that could run W7 better than Vista and XP, definitely enough of an impact on sales that W7 could sell better than Vista ever did at faster pace.
Snow Leopard is going to be an awesome upgrade too. Small changes all over; Exchange built in support, OpenCL/Grand Central, pure 64 bit optimized and leaner OS, data detectors, system-wide text manipulation support, and so on.
Ooh, sarcasm. That's right, I know nothing about law. But I live in Europe, if that counts.
Yes, it takes care of the problem as far as Microsoft's legal battles are concerned, but my point was that from an end user perspective Win7 will have much less goodies out of the box than Snow Leopard will, and people who are daft enough to believe that you can't fill the feature gaps easily and at no cost might go for a Mac just for that.MikhailT said:
Ooh, sarcasm. That's right, I know nothing about law. But I live in Europe, if that counts.
Yes, it takes care of the problem as far as Microsoft's legal battles are concerned, but my point was that from an end user perspective Win7 will have much less goodies out of the box than Snow Leopard will, and people who are daft enough to believe that you can't fill the feature gaps easily and at no cost might go for a Mac just for that.
