Moving to MacBook

[prescott28]

To make life easier and compact things I have more or less decided to move to a laptop for the various worky things I do and play games on the XBox as PC games seem to be moving that way. Anyway, a couple of questions -

1. Is moving from Vista to Leopard going to be difficult to do? I would want to be able to move files across and get on with the various jobs.

2. What sort of spec - I mean really how much RAM - I always go for lots of hard disk and can expand a bit using USB drives.

3. How much space does Leopard take up on the drive and can one partition the drive to leave Leopard and apps on one partition and data and stuff on another?

Thanks for any help. I have looked at Dell laptops but think Apple are better built.

 

[Will_3rd]

You should be able to find programs that have equivalents in Mac OSX, can always boot windows on your Mac if you need something in particular.

4GB is a good start as is it dirt cheap atm, as for HDD space up to you I have a 160GB one atm

You can slim it down but at max it takes up about 11GB, no need for partitioning on Mac OSX really more trouble then it is worth really.

The Dell laptops are good value for money but rather creaky when compared to Apple's machines.

 

[itsallaboutyou]

The Dell laptops are good value for money but rather creaky when compared to Apple's machines.

Agreed - I love my precision (I have to - for work.. grr) but it doesn't feel as solid!

And as Will said - there are apps that will do the same job on mac os... I've found no problems sending files between the two platforms..

Office for Mac 08 is solid, if a little bit sluggish with less ram and iwork is great! Pick up may's macworld and read the reviews and comparisons between word/pages, excel/numbers and powerpoint/keynote..

EDIT// I wouldnt partition.. I have the 160gb drive in my macbook and i bought all different types of backup drives before I settled on time capsule as the all in one.

I've now just got a little wd passport 160gb for transporting files etc - but tbh its overkill...

 

[prescott28]

Thanks guys! That is most helpful. I know that Apple hardware is usually rather more expensive that PC based hardware but what I have seen suggests the better quality.

I am going to have to bring a couple of important databases onto what ever machine I choose but I think I can get them running on OpenOffice Base while I see what else is about. (What can't Microsoft manage to port Access to Mac?) There are a couple of ports of openoffice on the way that should make things better.

I'll definitely go for the 4GB memory - it has got to make sense on a 64bit system. I think it will be time soon to make it to a Apple store though I can get a machine via my wife's employers, a university, which will get the costs down a bit.

Anyway thanks for the help.