Re: im about to start a war

[Greg Mills <gregmills@blueyonder.co.uk>]

Title: Re: im about to start a war

Good advice from everyone here. I’ve bought refurb Macs in the past and they have been fine. David’s advice on RAM is spot on, go for Kingston or similar and you can save a fair bit. As for the amount, in my experience OS X really likes as much RAM as it can get, and as upgrading from 2 to 4 GB will mean ditching what you have already invested in, I’d say max it out at the start.

The same thing that applies to the RAM applies to drives. I’d buy the stock Apple configuration and upgrade using a third-party drive. Fitting a new drive into a MBP is a doddle, they just slide right into a slot in the battery compartment. One thing to watch with external FW disks though, is the FW buss capacity. I had problems with my G4 PowerBook and a FW1814 interface. I couldn’t run the interface and an external drive on the same buss. I could have got a FW card buss adapter, but instead I fitted the biggest, fastest internal drive I could get, a Hitachi 7200rpm unit. This might still be an issue with the MBP line, although I haven’t any personal experience. See this thread for instance:

http://www.bigbluelounge.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=317998&sid=3fdd6ee7db2b76ba2910b5d8a6c1f7c2

It seems the MBPs have a less capable FW buss than the MacBooks and iMacs.

And as for Macs vs PCs, I have to say I’m a Mac user of 15 years so I’m biased, but only today I found another reason why I like Macs more. Apple give you a neat little utility called Migration Assistant. It enables you to move all of your files, apps and settings from an older Mac to a new one. This is free with the OS and it works beautifully. I needed to do the same for a PC user, so after an hour of googling I decided that Laplink’s PCMover seemed like a good bet. Except, you have to buy a once-only transfer licence for each migration at $50 a pop! Hmmm....

Greg


----- Original Message -----

Any discount I can get is great.  I will seriously consider this advise. $2300 is a good price! I went directly to the Apple site, and priced out a macbook pro, 15" screen, 2.4 ghz duo core, and then added 4gig of RAM, the larger 7200rpm hardrive, and Apple care...all added up to about $3600. My mother is an educator, so she could knock that down to $3300 if she bought the unit for me, since it is around my birth day when I planned on buying it. :)

Do I really need that faster hard drive though?