Profligacy

[oneplusme]

It having been several years since my last such adventure, I'm getting to the point where I feel like upgrading my computing kit. Seeing as I have a large and opinionated geek contingent on my friends list, I figure trawling for recommendations might be worth a try

Comments

[weds]

Oh, get the MacBook. If OSX ends up driving you bugfuck (and, past the initial adjustment period, I don't see why it would -- if you can cope with BSD and a little pretentious hipsterism, you should be fine) you can put Windows on for the stuff Linux won't do.

The only thing I might suggest is hopping up a notch to a 15" MacBook Pro. Some people have problems with the glossy screens on the plain MB, as well as the keyboards. Also, the shared VRAM thing can be a problem if you do need to do anything too intensive.

As for the "too big to carry" thing, I have a 17" Core Duo (refurb, bought just before the Core 2 Duo rollout ^^;) MBPro and it really hasn't been a problem.

[oneplusme]

The reason I'm thinking sub-15" is that my current (soon to be ex-) work laptop is a 15" one, and that's a bit larger and heavier than I like to carry around.

Ordinarily I'd run away screaming from Intel's embedded graphics, but since all I'm really after from it is "displays at decent resolutions" and "plays videos", I suspect it's not worth worrying overmuch.

Any idea if Apple's mini-DVI-to-SVideo adaptors are suitable for playing video on? I'd imagine that Apple would get that kind of thing right if anyone would, but having discovered how nasty my present VGA-to-SVideo adaptor makes things look, I'm somewhat wary.

[weds]

To the best of my knowledge, they are perfectly adequate. (I checked with Eric and he concurs.) IIRC, there's a fair few people using them with the current Mac mini with no issues at all.

[oneplusme]

Ah. That's a big help - thank you. (And happy rather-belated-birthday, too. The cake was, erm, eaten by terrorists. Big, glowing green terrorists. Sorry.)

[pm215]

I'm having trouble mentally justifying spending ~700ukp on a monitor

I think my take on this is that a decade ago when I bought my first PC I spent something like GBP 1000 and got a P60 with a 14" CRT. These days your GBP 1000 buys you a perfectly adequate CPU and a huge LCD. Sure, the CPU will be bottom-of-the-range by current specifications, but personally I found that CPU speeds reached 'fast enough' about five years ago: you literally can't buy a PC which is too slow any more (well, assuming you don't want to try to run Windows on it :-))

(Having said that, in practice I've chosen to spend almost no money on monitors *or* CPUs...)

[oneplusme]

The thing is, I already have a perfectly acceptable 21" CRT (and I'm one of those luddites who still think that CRTs do some things rather better), so to make it worth getting an LCD at all it'd need to be able to do something over 1600x1200. (And since the net is slowly beginning to fill with 1920x1080 video, that seems a good line for which to aim.)

CPU power, I agree, is unlikely to be much of a problem whatever I go for. Either a Core 2 or an Athlon X2 would more than handle my needs, I suspect.

[sleepy_morrigan]

The Wii!! The Wii!! Then I can play Zelda.

Dudes, have you got something against '£' signs?? GBP and UKP...jeez.

[oneplusme]

I don't have anything against £ signs, no, but lots of badly-configured PCs outside the UK tend not to display them, which can lead to confusion.

[pm215]

My keyboard isn't currently configured with a key to produce a pound sign :-)
Anyway, GBP is a habit from all the places (IRC, email, usenet) where it's not really very reliable to put in an actual pound sign.

[oneplusme]

Having looked around, it's now a toss-up between the MacBook and a Dell XPS M1210. With adaptors and bits there's not a lot in the price (Dell are marginally more expensive, but the hard drive is 40GB larger and that's with the 9-cell battery).

I've had a play with the keyboard on the MacBook, and it seemed okay, although the cursor keys are a bit small and they committed the cardinal laptop sin of putting the Fn key where Ctrl belongs... (which Dell of all people have gotten right).

[oneplusme]

There's a "special offer" one that's specced at 1GB RAM and a 2GHz CPU, and you probably have to remove their delightful service plans. (I'd need to get the 2GHz Mac because I need a DVD burner; also I'd need VGA and S-video converters for the Mac.) I ended up at ~930UKP for the Mac and ~980UKP for the Dell one.

I think I've already established that I have an er... different sense of aesthetics to most people, since I don't actually think the MacBook looks particularly pretty in any way. The camera on the Dell is pretty fugly, but the rest seems fine to me. Perhaps I should've been a Soviet battleship designer. ;)