Can your notebook do this

[NuggyBuggy 0]

I have a Macbook Pro (and thanks to Vapor, I have the pictures to prove it ).

There are some things about it I absolutely hate and I am not sure I would buy one again.

1) the thing runs hotter than hell. You cannot keep the thing comfortably on your lap, and in fact the manual tells you not to do it. The bottom of the case is designed to function as a heat sink, which means that if there's anything against it - like your legs, a blanket or a pillow to protect your legs from the searing heat - the computer will not cool properly and this in turn may shorten its life.

2) After running for a while it sometimes makes a high pitched whiny noise, barely at the threshold of hearing. The only way to get it to stop is to open a particular application (Photobooth).

3) Power management is retarded on Apple notebooks. I am told by our local Mac gurus that there is no equivalent of hibernation on Apples, which most PC laptops can do. On my 10 year old Thinkpad, there were power management options whereby I could tell it to swap the contents of memory to disk after so many minutes of idle time, or I could do it manually. The Apple can do this (they call it Safesleep), but it will only do it when the battery is just about completely exhausted - no way to configure it do this earlier, and no way to do it manually (at least not out of the box). If I leave my Macbook unplugged but closed for a few days, it is guaranteed to have run itself down and it is only useable after plugging it back in. That is brain dead.

4) The surface of the case, around the trackpad, is made of some material which seems to have some metal content. I don't this part of the case is aluminum, but whatever it is, if you are wearing a metal watchband, the scraping sensation that the two will make reminds me of nails being dragged along a chalkboard. I and the only other MBP owner I know personally have both stopped wearing our watches when using this thing. WTF ?

5) Battery life is mediocre.

All in all, mostly because of the heat issues but also its power management issues, this is a computer that is not ideal for toting around. It is not a laptop and if you read Apple's literature, they never call it that - they call it a "portable computer". It is meant to be used on a hard surface (the manual says this) and cannot be away from AC for very long even if closed.

[NuggyBuggy 0]

If you're going to buy a computer to run Windows, buy a Windows PC unless you have some real compelling reason why you also need to have a Mac. Last I looked, Dual booting a Macbook didn't work 100%, some features were dead (off the top of my head, I recall iSight).

Parallels (the software that people recommend if you want to run e.g. Windows INSIDE OS X) works, but as far as I am concerned not very well. Certainly it does not work as well as VMWare under either Windows or Linux. The biggest problem for me is that starting and stopping VMs takes an insane amount of time compared to VMWare. If virtualization of machines is important VMware has so many more features it's insane. Can Parallels do intelligent snapshots and differencing ? It's $30 software or whatever (I think it's a bit more, have to read their email again) but for $30 you get exactly what you pay for - a rinky dink VM.

Also a lot of software for the Mac still does not have native binaries for Intel. Oracle, for instance, is available for OS X but not under Intel.

[hockeymom 2]

I'm finalizing the purchase of a macbook for my daughter - 2 GB RAM and 120 GB hard drive

They've asked how I want the memory divided between OS X and Windows

How I THINK she'll be using it is to do all of her school work and imaging/web design on the mac side, and just surf on the windows side.

If this is the case - would an 80/20 split seem appropriate?

Is she better off domiciling the ipod on the mac side or the windows side?

Or... if she is truly only going to use windows for surfing - am I better off getting Parallels to run windows inside of OS X? I assume this would be less of a pain when keeping several programs active and wanting to surf at the same time. Would this change how I should get the hard drive configured?

Thanks much for the help!

[Vapor 0]

I'm finalizing the purchase of a macbook for my daughter - 2 GB RAM and 120 GB hard drive

They've asked how I want the memory divided between OS X and Windows

How I THINK she'll be using it is to do all of her school work and imaging/web design on the mac side, and just surf on the windows side.

If this is the case - would an 80/20 split seem appropriate?

Is she better off domiciling the ipod on the mac side or the windows side?

Or... if she is truly only going to use windows for surfing - am I better off getting Parallels to run windows inside of OS X? I assume this would be less of a pain when keeping several programs active and wanting to surf at the same time. Would this change how I should get the hard drive configured?

Thanks much for the help!

That a beuatiful machine. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMEND that she surfs on the mac. A lot of spyware and viruses are out there and a host of them can be accessed via the web. Here is what I would do...

I would get Parallels and she can use Windows only when she needs to (for a windows only app or something). With parallels you can aways change the size of the partition (hard drive split) using the disk utility tool. I would give the Apple 100 GB and the Windows parition 20 gb for now, and if shes gotta change it, its very simple. Let her do all her music and video and images on the mac, that is what a mac is made for. Let her dock the iPod in os x.

Parallels works very nicely with os x. I usually have both OS X and windows running via parallels and I dont even notice it most of the time. When you setup parallels, you have to set up how much ram you are going to allocate to Windows, I would go with 1GB... heres why. She has 2GB, which is perfect for os x (thats what I have), and OS X works very well with 1gb, so when she has to run windows it will run without a hickup. This way both os x and parallels (windows) have 1gb of ram, which is a solid amount.

[rogue 0]

I'm finalizing the purchase of a macbook for my daughter - 2 GB RAM and 120 GB hard drive

They've asked how I want the memory divided between OS X and Windows

How I THINK she'll be using it is to do all of her school work and imaging/web design on the mac side, and just surf on the windows side.

If this is the case - would an 80/20 split seem appropriate?

Is she better off domiciling the ipod on the mac side or the windows side?

Or... if she is truly only going to use windows for surfing - am I better off getting Parallels to run windows inside of OS X? I assume this would be less of a pain when keeping several programs active and wanting to surf at the same time. Would this change how I should get the hard drive configured?

Thanks much for the help!

If she is really only going to be using windows for surfing, she might as well just use OS X all the time including surfing. Theres no benifit to be had by using Windows for surfing instead of OS X. Infact surfing with OS X would probably be more enjoyable.

On the same note, if the majority of her time will be spent on OS X that would be where you want all the iPod stuff. If you want to add a few songs, you don't want to have to always reboot the computer to switch OS's.

It sounds like Parallels would be better for what she needs. Nearly everything you can do in windows can be done in OS X (and vice versa) but if for some reason you need Windows you can just open parallels instead of rebooting the computer.

[hockeymom 2]

Thanks guys... Here is the last remaining issue - she uses a particular website all the time that doesn't work well with mozilla or safari - and netscape is gone for macs. Her photoshop and other imaging stuff will be mac stuff. It is the usual problem of designing web pages and images on a mac/safari and then launching it on pc/netscape and things screw up on the page.

What's the best way to approach this?

** Edit ** I'm not sure I was clear that she posts a lot of pages and images to this site.

[Cavs019 708]

IE for Mac? Granted its a crap browser but it would most likely work.

[Vapor 0]

IE for Mac? Granted its a crap browser but it would most likely work.

ouch... it is. Have her boot it in windows or try out Flock or Shiira. Flock I doubt will work, but it may. Shiira is a very powerfull browser, may work on there.

[hockeymom 2]

Thanks much - I was hoping there might be an alternative to IE

One more, and especially stupid question. Which computer do I keep and which do I dump?

Her ibook G4, 800 MHz and 512 MB memory - well, they offered $300 Cdn for it - which essentially is go sell it yourself.

I have a bronze PowerBook G4, 550 MHz and 512 MB memory - and the 15" screen.

The ibook is smaller and newer and faster. The pwrbook is bigger and right now essentially has no files on it since I installed a new hard drive on it this spring.

Now that I've spent all this $$ on her new computer, it's going to be at least a year until I can get my macbook pro. So, which do I keep and which do I dump?

HA, not like I'm good at actually selling them - we now have 2 people, 4 macs and 1 pc.

[rogue 0]

There may be decent alternatives to IE for the sites she likes to surf that don't work w/ FF & Safari but since she is going to be developing web pages, you can't throw out IE entirely (as much as we may wish it were possible). IE renders some elements of websites (especially cascading style sheets) differently then all other browsers, as a result when making pages there really is no alternative to checking how the page looks in IE.

It's sounding more and more like Parallels would be best. It's real quick to open it up and check a site design or browse a site that doesn't work in Firefox.

Dual booting with Windows XP and OS X would just be a pain. I know from personal experience that when you are working page layouts for sites, you can reload a page hundreds of times in an hour to see how each little change effects things. Having to boot OS X or XP separately would pretty much eliminate any form of productivity.

Sorry if I kinda backtracked to your previous question, your last post just made me think of more reasons to go the Parallels route.

I would keep the iBook. Especially if its going to be the computer you will be using for a year until you get your MBP. You don't want to be using an underpowered laptop for that amount of time. Also you could still sell your Powerbook for $200-300. A year from now I doubt you would be able to get that much for it.