The impending sporadicity of Clyde
Just a heads up. I likely won't be in touch online as often as I'd like for a stretch here. I've been bitching about computer issues to some of you for awhile now, and they've been getting progressively worse. My laptop finally slowed itself to such a crawl that I couldn't even get Firefox to load my email cause it was timing out
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Sad they only tend to run fall semester. Wonder if for spring semester there'll be an after christmas thing? Waiting till august could be a smarter move though. Who knows, I may end up waiting that long anyway if I decide to save and pay up front instead of a payment plan.
I was actually considering messing with some of the stock configs cause I stress my computers a lot internally. The faster hard drive would be a good idea. The 8 gig ram would be too, but I'm not quite that rich. Anti glare is a near must; I'm sick of rotating at awkward angles on the couch to see the screen. Other stuff adds up of course. I may just have to suck it up and go for a refurb: if it works, it work, yanno? Still, might be able to find a payment plan that's agreeable, just don't much like the idea of being in debt on anything. And I completely spaced on the everyday discount for students: that knocked quite a bit off.
FWIW, you know I've been a Mac girl forever, yeah? Since '93?
Oh good, now I know who to NAG!
1 - Is it worth getting iWork or just downloading the OpenOffice suite? Will OpenOffice run on a MacBook Pro? (I think that's the Max OS Intel option, but not sure cause I'm not entirely savvy on the operating system terminology for these)
2 - If I need to do Windows only crap, are there decent emulators that won't suck so hard you can't do anything fast paced like gaming through them?
3 - Why does the price for Microsoft Office on the Mac fail so hard? More rhetorical then anything cause it fails so hard in general and I've been using OpenOffice on half the PCs in the house for some time due to it's suckage.
PS: I'm currently writing from a comp running Window 7. It feel SO much like Mac OSX that I LULZ.
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Anyways, answer-time!
1.) All new Macs are Intel and 10.6, and are capable of running OpenOffice. This does not necessarily mean it is a good idea ;) There are both practical and illogical reasons to prefer iWork...
a.) OpenOffice isn't designed for a Mac, which means it's not optimized for a Mac. This makes it very, very slow. It takes a significant amount of time to open itself up, which can be saved by the optional boot-some-bits-at-startup feature, but THAT also drags on resources, which is suboptimal. Second, OpenOffice is a drag on resources; you will notice it eating your RAM. This will matter a little less for you, but my Mac Mini only has 2GB of RAM, and let me tell you, I am DAMN AWARE when it is running because it makes everything feel glacial.
b.) It's not designed for a Mac and it FEELS that way. You may not care that the UI is totally un-Mac-like and that common keystrokes often don't work. But to me, this is obtrusively annoying, and reminds me I'm in a not-native program. (This is pretty much the illogical reason not to use it.)
iWork, on the other hand, is a fantastic piece of software. I've never used the Keynote because I don't need to present PowerPoints from a desktop, nor have I used Numbers because an anthro major doesn't do Excel shit. But Pages is excellent, lets you format everything like you're expected to be, responds to system-wide key commands, and integrates very smoothly with other Mac apps.
I will confess that I am only using the iWork trial right now; the full version is going to be my Christmas present from my parents. But I would still reocmmend it over OpenOffice.
2.) Parallels and VMWare Fusion are both great emulators, but no, you're not gonna be able to game. Because the ONLY Windows apps I use are games, I use BootCamp. BootCamp is an included utility with your Mac that allows you to set up a seperate partition for Windows. Then you install Windows like normal. When you're booting up the computer, you use option, which brings up the option to choose which OS to boot into. The downside is that you have to reboot and can't run them simultaenously. The good news is that when you boot into Windows it can take advantage of _all_ of your Mac (rather than the partial amount of processor and RAM that virtualization offers), which means that it will be as efficient as a PC with those same specs. But if you havea mission critical Windows app and want to be in OS X running your regular apps and then also have that app running, you're gonna need to virtualize. And if you virtualize, you can't game. it's sad but true.
What Windows-only apps are you going to retain when moving over? This will help decide between BC, virtual, or both.
3.) I have no idea. office is kinda expensive for PCs too though. There is a student discount version, but iWork is still cheaper.
Also, I have some great Mac apps I want to recommend to you when you gets yours. For example, Scrivener, which has made my writing SO MUCH MORE EFFICIENT. When you get it remind me to chatter on forever. :)
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There MAY be small Black Friday discounts, but I don't know if that is too soon for you to act re: financing. The prior discounts appear to be 50-150 off discounts, basically giving everyone the edu discount; I do NOT know if these couple with the edu discounts. Again, dunno if this is too soon for you. Best Buy may also be selling Macs @ a small Black Friday discount.
And, looking @ the 15" refurbs, right now for $1500 there's a 15"/2.53GHz/4GB RAM/250GB HD/illum keyboard/ nvidia 9400M graphics...which is $250 off. So when you do decide plz do keep your eye on the refurbs as they are quite decent.
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