I need help deciding on a new computer, Mac PowerBook vs. Windows laptop

[VigilanteCS]

Hi,
For high school graduation my grandparents are going to buy me a new computer. I already have a good gaming desktop, so I'd use this for games. Basically I'm having trouble deciding between a windows laptop or a powerbook. The main use of this would be typing college papers, photoshop and flash videos.

So I was either thinking an alienware laptop with a 3.6 GHz p4, 1 gig ddr2 533, geforce 6800 go, an 80 gig hdd, and an alienware 20.1" LCD

OR

A PowerBook with the 1.67 GHz G4, 128 mb ddr radeon 9700, and 1 gig of ddr333 ram with a 20" flat panel display.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, are apple LCD's any good?

I want the best because I don't want it go obsolete in 2 months. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[igloo15]

Suggestion forget about the alienware and look for something with really long battery life and a centrino proccessor. If you already have a gaming desktop why buy a gaming laptop your better off looking for something really light weight and with a really long battery life. Trust me I am in college now and carrying around a laptop can be a drag.

 

[VigilanteCS]

How long will a laptop with centrino stuff last? My dad has a toshiba with centrino technology and it lonly lasts for 2 hours...

What do you think about the mac? I'd use the 20" lcd for here at home (staying at home, college is only 15 miles away)

 

[SrGuapo]

Yeah, I would look at the newer P-M laptops. they will have a MUCH better batery life, as well as be much lighter weight. If you plan on carrying this around pretty often, you want something under 5 lbs.

I would suggest a nice system with a Dothan processor (any of them should be plenty for what you plan to be doing), 512 MB RAM, and a decent, but not Top-Of-The-Line GPU. That will easily let you run all the office programs, as well as give you a lighteweight and power-savy design.

 

[AMDZen]

If you really want the Alienware for gaming and such, go to another Sager Retailer instead. See, alienware uses Clevo Notebooks, so a very good reseller like Pctorque.com which sells Sager Notebooks, is selling the absolute identical laptop, except for a much better price. Their customer service is ever on par, or better than AW. Check resellerratings.com for others, but I can personally vouch for PCTorque.com.

AS for the MAC, well I bough a PowerBook because its just so god darned sexay, but I regretted it and ended up selling it. I prefer PC, if you are a MAC man then maybe you will like it better, I wasn't too impressed but I'm not much of a MAC fan other then OSX

 

[aatf510]

I would suggest that you get a light-weight long battery life laptop as your secordary computer as well. Trust me, it is not so much fun to carry around P4-based laptop or a 20" LCD laptop around. I currently bring my 5 lb Centrino to classes, and it does get quite heavy when add up with books.

 

[VigilanteCS]

Originally posted by: toattett
I would suggest that you get a light-weight long battery life laptop as your secordary computer as well. Trust me, it is not so much fun to carry around P4-based laptop or a 20" LCD laptop around. I currently bring my 5 lb Centrino to classes, and it does get quite heavy when add up with books.

The LCD is a seperate display....I've decided against it anway.

As for macintosh, I've never owned a Mac before and I've heard that OSX is excellent and very stable, and you don't have to worry about viruses and spyware too much. The 15" PowerBooks battery life is rated at 2.5 hours.

Like I said before, my dad has a centrino laptop and the battery life sucks (when you highlite the battery when it's full it says only 2 hours!)

 

[aatf510]

My centrino 1.5GHz + ATI MR9700 + 1GB DDR333 (approx 5lb) claims to last 5 hours, and it usually does 4 1/2 (w/o any gaming of coz)

It does CS:S @ 40-60fps @1024x768 + medium details

Afterall, I think it is still too heavy to carry around to every class
so if I got to choose again, I would get a 12.1" 2lb laptop

 

[homercles337]

If your home machine is windows stick with a lightweight, longlife windows laptop. Unless you want to buy TWO copies of all the software you plan to be using. I use Adobe, Office, EndNote, matlab, etc all the time and sure as hell couldnt afford to buy two copies of all of those!

 

[VigilanteCS]

Originally posted by: homercles337
If your home machine is windows stick with a lightweight, longlife windows laptop. Unless you want to buy TWO copies of all the software you plan to be using. I use Adobe, Office, EndNote, matlab, etc all the time and sure as hell couldnt afford to buy two copies of all of those!

Good point, thanks

 

[Melchior]

Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop.

 

[addragyn]

He's going to college, so the software is likely to be free or close to it. Depending on your software it might only be licensed to a single computer anyways.

Powerbooks get from 2.5 -5 hours battery life.

I would not buy a Powerbook right now. The G4 is an excellent modile processor but until FSB speeds come up I will not buy a new one.

 

[VigilanteCS]

What is the FSB they have? I cannot order this for 3 more months (Graduation). Is these any chance they will go up by then? Thanks

 

[MrBond]

Look at T-series thinkpads. My 4 year old thinkpad t20 still gets over 2 hours off a battery charge.

They're thin, relativly light, and built like tanks. I'll probably never buy another brand of laptop, IBM has a T-Series customer for life.

It used to be you could get awesome deals from IBM's ebay store, I haven't looked recently though. Check it here:

http://stores.ebay.com/id=23983696?ssPageName=L2

 

[ribbon13]

Pentium-M all the way. Centrino's blow compared to Dothan. Battery life shouldn't be a huge concern for a college student. If your at a point where you can sit down and use your notebook, then you can probably AC it too.

 

[VigilanteCS]

Whats Dothan?

 

[addragyn]

167MHz :thumbsdown:

Don't ge me wrong they're nice machines and I sometime use a 17" and it handles FCP just fine. But, it's obvious that the next machines are going to be a leap in performance because the FSB is going to get a kick in the ass.

Current machines use the Freescale 7447a. It's a good performer, that is hamstrung by the slow FSB.

I'm hoping the next machine uses the MPC8641/8641D. It's an improved core, on a 90nm SOI process with integrated DDR memory controller and PCI Express, and it doubles the L2 to 1MB. Plenty of benefits, PLUS it's will be available in single and dual cores. I'd expect this thing to give a G5 a serious run for the money while using much less power.

 

[kd2777]

I have a DELL 700m with a 1.8 Dothan, CD/DVD drive, 1.25GB RAM, 60GB HDD, and the extended battery. With the extented battery I get about 5 hours of use off it. I uses the intel extreme graphics, but that is all I need for what it is used for. It is the lightest notebook Dell makes and it has a 12.1 wide screen.

kd

 

[VigilanteCS]

What is a Dothan?

 

[imverygifted]

the dothan is the newer pentium m processor w/ a 2 meg cache instead of 1- i recently (over last summer) bought a computer for college from proportable.com M5N get the extended battery has about 7 hours of actual use and weighs about 3-4 pounds even with the extended battery. its a regular 12" screen 1024x768

 

[ribbon13]

Dothans out perform Prescotts. Which has been an embarrasment for Intel. Haha!

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: addragyn
He's going to college, so the software is likely to be free or close to it. Depending on your software it might only be licensed to a single computer anyways.

Powerbooks get from 2.5 -5 hours battery life.

I would not buy a Powerbook right now. The G4 is an excellent modile processor but until FSB speeds come up I will not buy a new one.

Well, im a postdoc, so i still get any academic discount i want, and trust me when i say IT IS STILL PRICEY! It also depends on the uni. For example UT at Austin (my first postdoc out of grad school) has a deal with MS. This means that winXP pro is $6, Office 2003 Pro $12, but Photoshop $275. Here at Penn Office pro is $199, same version. I went to grad school at Berkeley and Photoshop7/Illustrator10 combo was $99. It all depends really, but no uni is going to have deeply discounted software across the board. The point is that in the software world mac != windows. So regardless where he goes running windows and mac will double ANY software budget. Plain and simple.

 

[VigilanteCS]

homercles337, so are you saying it doesnt matter which I go with, mac or windows?

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: VigilanteCS
homercles337, so are you saying it doesnt matter which I go with, mac or windows?

No. Im saying if you go with a mac be prepared to pay DOUBLE for any software you buy. (That is, unless you plan on only doing task A on mac and task B on PC.) If you go with a mac and want to run photoshop on both your mac and PC (because you probably wont want to work on JUST your mac or JUST your PC) be prepared to pay double. One copy for your mac one for your PC. Thats what im dealing with right now. My lab runs only macs, but i just built a new PC for home use and either i pay for PC software outta my own pocket or i wont be able to do any work on my PC (not a good thing). If i were in your position, i would not go with a mac because of this. Not to mention that they are rather different OSs with irritating little differences. Just my $0.02...

 

[VigilanteCS]

ok, the last sentence of your post was a little misleading, but thanks for the input. I think I'm going to get a Dell Inspirion XPS Gen. 2