So my home computer's now something like 5 years old, and my work computer isn't much better (though I have no idea, but its worst than my home computer at any rate).
I still have an old Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card which, although it supports most games, is starting to show its age (what with not playing Bioshock, Fallout 3, etc.). My sound card is an old SoundBlaster Audigy 2 and, although it does the job, like the graphics card, it's starting to show its age.
So I figured I'd buy a new one; why not a laptop? Laptops are becoming incredibly powerful and are able to run pretty much any games nowadays, and it'd solve the problem of having a sucky home & work computer; plus, classes would become insanely more interesting.
Except that laptops in general are pricey, especially since I want one with a good graphics card and stuff; harddrive space is more or less irrelevant since I have two external SATA drives, so it's pretty much all about the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card, the sound card and whatever other neat thing comes with it.
And, as you might've guessed, I've thought about buying one of the new Macs (not the Air though; seems expensive as fuck for nothing). They're much more expensive than the others, but still, I assumed (maybe wrongfully) that they were worth the price? The GeForce 9400M looks pretty neat for the price and all.
Now, I'm not too keen on processor speeds; I currently have an AMD Athlon64 2.0GHz, so you might guess that I'm pretty eager to make the big move to dual core. The Mac offers a Intel 2.0GHz Core Duo, but I have no real idea of how good it is; I can see it's probably enough for whatever I might need (since I'm not doing heavy computational work like FACTORIZING PRIMES WITH 200 DIGITS and BREAKING RSA ENCRYPTION), but that's about it.
It's got 2GB of DDR3, which is much better than what I have right now, 5 hours of battery life (no idea if that's good or not), and it weighs only 2kg. Now, even though weight might not count for some, I've lugged around an old laptop for two months, and its a fucking pain in the ass to do.
They offer the same one but for 300$ more, and it's got increased CPU power (2.4GHz Core Duo), 4GB DDR3 (do I really need 4GB...?), and 320GB harddrive (yeah, again, I don't think I really need that).
Or maybe I should be looking into other stuff; I just figured that if I had a Mac, I could run ANY OS from it, whereas if I have a PC, it's a bit harder to find a Mac OS X image and stuff. Plus, I admit, I'm a sucker for TextMate and the other web development tools. And it ships with Ruby (I think?).
So anyway...worth the price? Or should I be looking at other companies? Or are laptops fucking underpowered for the same price compared to desktops.
I still have an old Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card which, although it supports most games, is starting to show its age (what with not playing Bioshock, Fallout 3, etc.). My sound card is an old SoundBlaster Audigy 2 and, although it does the job, like the graphics card, it's starting to show its age.
So I figured I'd buy a new one; why not a laptop? Laptops are becoming incredibly powerful and are able to run pretty much any games nowadays, and it'd solve the problem of having a sucky home & work computer; plus, classes would become insanely more interesting.
Except that laptops in general are pricey, especially since I want one with a good graphics card and stuff; harddrive space is more or less irrelevant since I have two external SATA drives, so it's pretty much all about the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card, the sound card and whatever other neat thing comes with it.
And, as you might've guessed, I've thought about buying one of the new Macs (not the Air though; seems expensive as fuck for nothing). They're much more expensive than the others, but still, I assumed (maybe wrongfully) that they were worth the price? The GeForce 9400M looks pretty neat for the price and all.
Now, I'm not too keen on processor speeds; I currently have an AMD Athlon64 2.0GHz, so you might guess that I'm pretty eager to make the big move to dual core. The Mac offers a Intel 2.0GHz Core Duo, but I have no real idea of how good it is; I can see it's probably enough for whatever I might need (since I'm not doing heavy computational work like FACTORIZING PRIMES WITH 200 DIGITS and BREAKING RSA ENCRYPTION), but that's about it.
It's got 2GB of DDR3, which is much better than what I have right now, 5 hours of battery life (no idea if that's good or not), and it weighs only 2kg. Now, even though weight might not count for some, I've lugged around an old laptop for two months, and its a fucking pain in the ass to do.
They offer the same one but for 300$ more, and it's got increased CPU power (2.4GHz Core Duo), 4GB DDR3 (do I really need 4GB...?), and 320GB harddrive (yeah, again, I don't think I really need that).
Or maybe I should be looking into other stuff; I just figured that if I had a Mac, I could run ANY OS from it, whereas if I have a PC, it's a bit harder to find a Mac OS X image and stuff. Plus, I admit, I'm a sucker for TextMate and the other web development tools. And it ships with Ruby (I think?).
So anyway...worth the price? Or should I be looking at other companies? Or are laptops fucking underpowered for the same price compared to desktops.
It's really nice for its price, I paid more than twice that for my current tablet several years ago and its specs aren't as good, except for the screen res being much better. But I haven't seen a tablet above 1280x800 for a while (which is a pissoff). If I could afford a modbook I'd go for that, as it is I will probably be getting a Fujitsu or maybe going cheap and grabbing that HP.