Praxis wrote:I'd recommend a MacBook if you're not a heavy gamer. The Intel GMA 950 graphics chip works well for casual gaming- it can play Half-Life 2 at absolute minimum settings, and can play *most* games on the market on low-to-medium settings, just don't turn on antialiasing. But don't expect 60 FPS w/4x AA @ native resolution.
Education discounts will save you $50-$100, and you can save $100-$200 buying the system on Apple's refurbished store with the education discount.
Also, buy a new Mac before September 16th and students get a free iPod Nano w/rebate (which in my experience has always come through with Apple).
Regardless of whether you buy a Mac or not- get a Core Duo. Actually, since the Core 2 Duo just came out and will be shipping in laptops by the end of this month, you might want to wait and get a Core 2 Duo (20% faster at the same clock speed and 64-bit). But don't settle for less than a Core Duo.
Glocksman wrote:
Plus now you won't pay an arm and a leg for add in upgrade hardware if you decide to add more RAM or something else since Apple now uses bog standard Intel processors and chipsets.
You never did...I bought standard 200-pin DDR RAM off of newegg IIRC for my mother's PowerBook, the type listed on Apple's "What RAM should I buy?" pages. I removed my old Pismo's hard drive and used it in a standard PC external hard drive casing. They've always used standard RAM, standard hard drives, and overall entirely standard hardware except for the processor and GPUs (required Mac Edition cards), but you can't upgrade those on most laptops anyway (since the processor is soldered in).
Don't earlier macs take different memory because of the liitle endian-big endian byte order difference between x86 and Moto 680x0 CPU's?
If not, then I'm in error.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier
Durandal wrote:Dell laptops are shoddy and poorly-built, in my opinion. I'd recommend a MacBook or ThinkPad if you absolutely need to put up with Windows' shit.
The macbook is a tad small, only a 13.3" screen, I'd rather take something like an HP dv5000t, 15.4" is a far better screen size in my opinion. But whatever you do, make sure you've got at least 3 years coverage on the parts.
Bigger is not always better. I had a 17" Dell in undergrad that killed me, especially when you added the weight of textbooks (and as a math student, Surlethe will have heavier textbooks than I did). By the time I hit grad school, I had a 13" iBook which I could comfortably carry from the west end of Penn's campus to the PATCO station at 16th and Locust, about a two mile walk.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
Durandal wrote:Dell laptops are shoddy and poorly-built, in my opinion. I'd recommend a MacBook or ThinkPad if you absolutely need to put up with Windows' shit.
The macbook is a tad small, only a 13.3" screen, I'd rather take something like an HP dv5000t, 15.4" is a far better screen size in my opinion. But whatever you do, make sure you've got at least 3 years coverage on the parts.
Bigger is not always better. I had a 17" Dell in undergrad that killed me, especially when you added the weight of textbooks (and as a math student, Surlethe will have heavier textbooks than I did). By the time I hit grad school, I had a 13" iBook which I could comfortably carry from the west end of Penn's campus to the PATCO station at 16th and Locust, about a two mile walk.
I agree, 17" may be overdoing it when you don't have access to a car, but my 6 pound 15.4" HP laptop has been perfect; granted where I go to school nothing is more than a mile away, but I certainly wouldn't take anything much smaller as my primary computer. You could get a new monitor, and keyboard, and mouse; maybe even one of those $150 docking stations (why the fuck are they so expensive..?), but unless you have to travel a lot and a savings of 2 or 3 pounds is a big deal I think your money is better spent on something larger than 13".
