Seriously considering binning my PC for a Mac

[darrensen]

Stick to Safari..... I find FF doesn't run that fast of a mac. Much better on a PC.

[Gordy]

I've always been a PC user but I have two brothers who recently acquired laptops. One a Dell Vostro and the other a macbook. I guess my question is, why does the Macbook cost so much more? I'm assuming it's because of the endless companies able to make PCs while Apple has a lock on the market.

But is it really worth the extra cost?

Compare like for like with dell and apple and you will find a very small difference in price. Dell only do one 13in notebook and its much more expensive than their cheaper lines. Same with the macbook pro like for like they damn good value.

Stick to Safari..... I find FF doesn't run that fast of a mac. Much better on a PC.

Yeah, but safari is poor in supporting many websites and doesn't have the add ons that firefox has. Firefox is great generally whereas I find safari very quick but frustrating to use. Not to mention some stupid features like open in tabs will load all subfolders of bookmarks which is just silly.

[wedge22]

Well I see that it looks like the iMac for me then. Are you able to upgrade the memory yourself without voiding the warranty?? Also will the apple os read info from my external HDD which has been formatted using NTFS on XP? I have alot of files on there I need.
And how much do you guys think my system is actually worth?

[Gordy]

OS X can read ntfs drives, but not write to them. What I would suggest is copying everything across to a different drive . Then formatting that one to Mac OS format.

[directhex]

macfuse - Google Code plus NTFS-3G for OS X Revived

inject some linux love onto the mac

[darrensen]

Well I see that it looks like the iMac for me then. Are you able to upgrade the memory yourself without voiding the warranty?? Also will the apple os read info from my external HDD which has been formatted using NTFS on XP? I have alot of files on there I need.
And how much do you guys think my system is actually worth?

You can easily upgrade the ram and not void the warranty. Get the Ram from crucial, it's v cheap and guaranteed to work with Mac.

[wedge22]

Excellent I have a 500Gb internal HDD to transfer the files too first.

[Guy]

I use Firefox and both my main pc and my macbook, and have to say it isnt as stable on the macbook but I really cant get on with safari, so I just have to put up with the lock up here and there i guess.

[darrensen]

Yes at the moment Safari isn't what it used to be. Give it a few months and Apple should have fixed it.

[Devil_2000]

Safari feels like cripple ware compared to FF. Hopefully a more powerful version will arrive soon.

[Gunbuster]

I got to play with a Mac for a couple of weeks and I tried pretty much every browser I could lay my hands on. Shiira and Omniweb were my favs, but as a cheap skate I would stick with Shiira as it is free. Not a long term or objective test, just my gut reaction. I use Opera (occasionally Maxthon) on Windows if that is any indication of my preferences.

[Guy]

Bit of an update, but ive now decided to ditch my main desktop, albeit keeping my screen, speakers and mouse, and have got myself the top spec 15 inch macbook pro Toying with the idea of sticking xp on a small partion so that im still able to play my games, how is bootcamp working out for everyone? (Gordy am I right in thinking uv got xp on urs?)

[Gordy]

Yeah I've got a 50gb partition with a copy of windows xp on there. I don't use it too much mainly for browser testing and the odd bit of client support. I usually just use vmware's fusion to boot up in windows, but I do have boot camp setup as well if I need more omph. I thought I'd do more gaming on it, but I haven't done any really. Will have to find some time for some team fortress action soon tho!

[Guy]

I toyed with the idea of having virtual machine/what ever equivilents there are, but prefer the idea of having a dual boot set up tbh. Im probabily only gonna give the xp partition 25-30gb's of space, because it will solely be for games tbh.

Also anyone know how well games run on mbook pros?

[Gordy]

You can have the best of both worlds with vmware/parrallels and bootcamp. The former will quite happily work using the boot camp partition, if you need to do some gaming or whatever you can reboot into windows.

Most games will run fine on the latest mbp's as they have the nVidia gfx card which is quite good.

[Guy]

Fair enough, am in xp atm, after finally downloading all the patches here and there, sticking on kaspersky and rebooting for what feels like the tenth time! the process was suprisingly nice and straight forward
Just installing COD4 on it to see what the pro can handle!