I dislike my laptop
At this moment i’m very tired of my laptop. A string of viruses have plagued it since last week. New antivirus has been installed (G-Data now) in place off the old (Avast!). I’ve reinstalled spy-bot search and destroy (why did i ever delete it!??) and I’ve doubled up on software firewalls (ZoneAlarm + G-Data).
I’ve lost countless hours due to these invasions… 
This weekend i upgraded RAM in my laptop to 3Gig (had two 1GB sticks, had to replace one of them with a 2GB) to help support the new antivirus, and I bought a 1TB external backup drive to save important stuff too.
While shopping in Akihabara (*the* place to go in Tokyo for electronics) for new memory and backup drives, we took the Macbook with the dead hard drive to a Mac store. They confirmed the drive was dead and unrepairable, so we ended up buying a new 320GB drive for roughly $50, plus a new copy of OS X (because we didn’t have the cds). Luck would have it that the 1Gig RAM chip I replaced in my laptop was the same RAM used in the Macbook, so it got a memory boost too.
This virus ordeal makes me think that a transition to working entirely off a Mac could be easier than I previously feared.
January 13th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Preaching to the choir on this one. You know I’ve been using a mac exclusively in a company with 1000+ windows boxes 3 years now. I love it, as long as the hardware holds up. Macs do have hardware issues from time to time, but with an adequate warranty, you’ll never be out of commission more then a few days. Ironically my mac is in the shop right now for motherboard issue and I’m actually running an IBM T40 with Ubuntu Karmic. Ubuntu has come a long way as well, though I couldn’t use it full time, since a lot of commercial software still doesn’t run on linux. But as development box, it suites me well enough.
January 13th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
You’ve definitely had your share of hardware problems… why is that? Are macs really prone to having more hardware issues?
As far as software goes, I’d need to get office and adobe creative suite cs3 for the mac… both expensive. Outside of those 2 applications, I think everything else that I use regularly is easily gotten or replaced.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
I\’d say, that indeed macs have at least as many hardware problems as other computers, or even more. They have the best commercial os on the market, and I\’m a huge fan of the entire mac philosophy. However, I\’m going to say that if I am a user am the norm, then indeed expect at least 1 of every mac product you have to break in a major way. At least Apple honors there warranty program. Though, I\’m not entirely convinced they have ever made any money off of me.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Rumor is that Macbook Pros will soon be refreshed with Intel Core i5s very soon. *hint hint*
If you have certain Windows software that you just have to have, you can always dual boot. Windows 7 runs beautifully on pretty much any Macbook Pro. I keep 3 partitions on all my MBP’s: one for OSX, one for Windows 7, and a 3rd for shared data between them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
dual boot may solve it… but the only thing i worry about is $ involved in setup.
I’m actually quite interested in the rumored mac tablet
but I bet a macbook pro would be better for my line of work.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:38 am
I used Parallels for quite sometime at work to bridge the gap between windows and mac. Its still on my machine, but I find once a year. In fact last time a booted it, I had forgot my windows login. 99% of the time there is an acceptable mac alternative, and if your a real dare devil you can always install wine on fink/port to let you run those simple .exes that occasionally show up.
January 14th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
I am definitely teetering on the edge. Snow leopard on macbook with extra ram is running quite nice now…
January 17th, 2010 at 6:58 am
With a good chunk of RAM, Windows 7 runs quite smoothly in VMWare Fusion. I had issues with it being slow with 4GB, but with 8GB it’s much better. I very rarely even use it or reboot into Win7 though. When I do, it’s almost always for a game or this particular weather radar program that doesn’t get along well with virtualization. Like Jim said, there are alternatives that are as good (if not better) for just about anything you’d do on Windows.
One thing you’ll want to check on if you do go with the Mac version of Adobe CS is that some people had major issues with CS4 and Snow Leopard when SL first came out. I don’t know if they sorted that out or what, but that’s something you should be aware of.
iWork is a great Office alternative if you don’t need databases or more complicated spreadsheet stuff (or macros). Quite frankly, the current Mac version of Office is crappy and slow. There’s OpenOffice, too.
And yeah, it is probably going to cost more up front than a comparable Windows laptop, but just think of all the time and hassle you’ll save not worrying about viruses and malware. I hear they have excellent service, too. I’ve never used it because the closest Apple store is 3 hours away, so we always use an authorized repair website we can UPS the stuff to.
Rumors are the tablet is going to be like an iPhone on steroids. So I assume that means it won’t be running the normal desktop OSX. That’s still a rumor though, so take it with a grain of salt. Hopefullly we’ll know for sure in about 10 days.
January 17th, 2010 at 8:32 am
Plenty of convincing arguments here… perhaps 2010 is the year i finally convert… year of the tiger no less
January 17th, 2010 at 8:34 am
ok, a doh! moment when submitting… i had Tiger installed on the macbook before hdd stopped and i had to buy leopard… so yes, tiger != leopard
January 27th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
MAC in a LAN environment?! Say it ain’t so… >_<
January 27th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
everbody reboot!