Have your say & ask the experts

I have a Macbook which is just under 3 years old and I have to say it's a superb machine. I use it for music, photographs and surfing the net and it's more than adequate even now it's 3 years out of date.

Having said that I understand that they can be a bit pricy and if I'd gone for a PC I'd have bought a Dell or one of the other big brands (HP or Sony).

I'm looking for one for my Nephew at the moment and am erring on the side of Dell or HP purely on price.

As for the specification you ideally want an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with at least 2gb of RAM and a relatively large Hard drive although the size doesn't really matter as you can always opt for an external one if you need more space.

Look at Acer too - much better made than Dell or HP (I used to sell IT kit a while back) and about the same price.

£500 gets you all you need. Use my Travelmate (approx £640 ex VAT - it's my work machine) and it's completely reliable, stores the billion hi res photos I have without problems, runs everything fine and even looks good. Consider getting XP though instead of Vista (I did) - Vista is a slow, resource hungry waste of memory and HD space.

Oh and laptopsdirect are brilliant.

 

 

Surf Matt:

Look at Acer too - much better made than Dell or HP (I used to sell IT kit a while back) and about the same price.

£500 gets you all you need. Use my Travelmate (approx £640 ex VAT - it's my work machine) and it's completely reliable, stores the billion hi res photos I have without problems, runs everything fine and even looks good. Consider getting XP though instead of Vista (I did) - Vista is a slow, resource hungry waste of memory and HD space.

Oh and laptopsdirect are brilliant.

 

 

Tick tick tick on pretty much all of that (provided windows is your favoured OS).......

I'm looking to get rid of my ibook which is 2 years old and replace it with something decent. Currently thinking the acer aspire 5355 with 3gb ram and 250gb hdd which can be had for £379.

Would this be fine processor wise for general web surfing, playing music, and some light photoshopping/editing? Apparently its a AMD Athlon(TM) X2 QL60 processor

I found the mac had the spinning wheel of death far to often right from the start and now it's really annoying me.

Macs love memory. How much has yours got?

fast eddie:

and some light photoshopping/editing?

This is the most processor consuming task on your list and I think you'll be fine. I travel a bit for my work and during that time travelling I become a freelance graphic designer and film editor. My laptop is not much faster than that to be honest and I have no reason to complain. Much. 

JohnDuncan:

Macs love memory. How much has yours got?

John's right though. If your Mac ain't full up I'd do that first. 

Octopo:

JohnDuncan:

Macs love memory. How much has yours got?

John's right though. If your Mac ain't full up I'd do that first.

Specifically for graphics editing, certainly - the other tasks on your list should be fine. And obviously it depends which programmes you're using and what their memory management is doing - Photoshop for example can benefit from tweaking its setting to make best use of physcial and cache memory, while Aperture just likes a whole load of RAM.

Course, dunno if this is an Intel iBook (did they exist) or a powerpc one, they may beheva differently, and a cheap laptop may indeed be your best option - though note you'll have to replace all your software.........

the problem i have is that even though i probably wont use it for gaming as i have a 360 and the like, i would like to have the option in case a great game was released on pc not consoles.

 

i think alienware or dell xps is the answer im looking for but i will follow advice and get the lesser graphics card and better RAM and processor i think.

 

also whats airport express? and what in the world is apple tv too?

thehoss:

the problem i have is that even though i probably wont use it for gaming as i have a 360 and the like, i would like to have the option in case a great game was released on pc not consoles.

IMO you should decide between the two unless you are easily willing to part with the cash. Alienware, XPS (top of the line) e.t.c. are great but it seems like 95% of the time you will be paying for a powerful graphics card you don't really need.

OK, if you want to play games then it def has to be a PC, but if that's one of its functions then I'd go for the best graphics card - latest games will knock the hell out of it.....

I summarise airport express here. You can think of Apple TV as a video iPod that you plug into your telly with a gorgeous interface for browsing music and movies, but can also stream video or audio from the internet and your computer.

And whilst alienware and xps are def gaming machines, don't rule out normal laptops like those mentioned above, just spec the graphics card or processor or memory higher - alienware are stupidly expensive and you could find an almost identically spec'd "less cool" machine for much less.

Compare various gaming-spec laptops here

but alienware is sexy!!

 

and we all buy kit both for performance and aesthetics!!

 

but its pricey indeed!

 

do i really wanna spend 2grand on a laptop!

thehoss:

and we all buy kit both for performance and aesthetics

Nonsense

JohnDuncan:

Octopo:

JohnDuncan:

Macs love memory. How much has yours got?

John's right though. If your Mac ain't full up I'd do that first.

Specifically for graphics editing, certainly - the other tasks on your list should be fine. And obviously it depends which programmes you're using and what their memory management is doing - Photoshop for example can benefit from tweaking its setting to make best use of physcial and cache memory, while Aperture just likes a whole load of RAM.

Course, dunno if this is an Intel iBook (did they exist) or a powerpc one, they may beheva differently, and a cheap laptop may indeed be your best option - though note you'll have to replace all your software.........

Currently got 512mb in there, even things like switching between tabs can cause the rainbow wheel, but then photoshop seems to run fine after its opened. About the only thing i do is sometimes change saturation etc. If i can't get the photo nearly 100% without editing then i'm not doing it right imho.

I had thought about adding more memory, but if it werent for the fact i couldn't take the machine back when i bought it (didnt learn all the things i hate about it till after the 14 days john lewis gave) i would have switched to a pc again much much earlier. This might be a good excuse, looking on ebay i think i could get about £200 for the mac which means only £170 odd to spend.

Software is not a problem. i have photoshop cs2 and office 03 (i think) for both pc and mac since i also had a desktop till last week.