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kryzak
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PC vs Apple 24 Dec 2008, 02:44
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refurb
Kryzak,

What do you think about the ultra-light vs. regular laptops?

From what I saw in my visits, you pretty much drag your laptop around with you all day. A 5 lb laptop would be much nicer than a 10 lb in that case.

Do you need to bring your laptop with you to every class? I guess it probably depends on the class....

Let me ask this, how many first year classes could you get away with bringing just a notepad and pen?

RF
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I would highly recommend a laptop lighter than 5 lbs. The X200 with 9-cell battery is 3.9 lbs and with 4-cell is 2.9 lbs. That's probably as light as a laptop with a full sized keyboard gets (there are much smaller and lighter ones, but the keyboards get smaller too). You WILL be dragging your laptop around all day, from morning till you go home. You may not need it in most classes (I use paper and pen for all my class notes, I know, I'm old fashioned), but in between classes you're probably catching up on email and getting club/career stuff done with your laptop.

I know a few of my friends who have T61s are wishing they got the X200 or a NetBook now. :)
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PC vs Apple 24 Dec 2008, 03:56
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Having spent the last year and a half toting mine back and forth to school almost every day... my advice is get something decent but lightweight. I have an X61 tablet edition and I love it. I don't much use the tablet function, although occasionally it comes in handy. If I had to repurchase, I'd do sans tablet... but the X61 is fabulous - lightweight, long battery life, and easy to tote around.

Increasingly, I've been seeing some people sporting some of hte ultra notebooks. I've thought of going this route as well, since frankly, 98% of what I do boils down to Excel, Word, Outlook and Firefox. See:

https://eeepc.asus.com/global/products.html?n=0
https://www.acer.com/aspireone/
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834115514

I haven't seen the lenovo ideapad in person yet, but I imagine thats also a nice choice. The X300 is of course also excellent, although it's roughly 10x the price.
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PC vs Apple 24 Dec 2008, 05:01
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egy
I use macs and pcs (typing this on a macbook air but use a pc for work and have a desktop pc) on a regular basis. They each have their strengths and weaknesses... but two things stick out for me about having a mac in bschool:

- Office 2008 for Mac mostly sucks. Excel in particular. Given the amount of Office work we'll need to be doing, I would not use Office for mac at all. For the occasional spreadsheet or document, fine.. but for anything more significant, nope. Yes you can use bootcamp or parallels, but frankly, it's a pain in the ass. It's either going to be slow, or you're simply going to be booting into XP/Vista all the time... at which point why bother with a mac at all?

- You'll almost certainly be able to get great deals on lenovos, making macs even more expensive compared to pcs.
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I run Office in VMWare (Parallels competitor) and it's not slow at all. Your problem is the Air only has 2GM RAM - if you're going to be virtualizing you really need 4GB. Anyhow, I definitely plan on sticking with the Mac...
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PC vs Apple 26 Dec 2008, 16:20
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monkbent
I run Office in VMWare (Parallels competitor) and it's not slow at all. Your problem is the Air only has 2GM RAM - if you're going to be virtualizing you really need 4GB. Anyhow, I definitely plan on sticking with the Mac...
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Agreed. Vista screams on a 4GB, 2.4GHz MacBook running VMWare Fusion with 1GB dedicated.

ozzie123
I say, go with the one you like. Besides, PC vs Apple debate is a moot point now because both can run both OSes (albeit with some hacking for PC to run OSX).
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For the love of god, nobody should be using OS X hacked on a PC for anything critical. I'm an avid contributor in the OSx86 community and have run OS X on dozens of PCs. You're asking for trouble if you want to do it on a machine that you must rely on 100% of the time.

As for Windows on a Mac, there are many ways to do it and they're all foolproof; Boot Camp makes a Mac a PC in every important way and VMWare is enterprise-quality and damn near bullet-proof.
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PC vs Apple 26 Dec 2008, 17:59
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Personally, I think netbooks are the way to go. The Intel Atom processor is good enough to handle Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and is very energy efficient. The netbooks are light (~2 lb) and cheap (~$350), if you are willing to forgo a media drive and live with small screen real estate. Bonus, they don't even save you the effort of reformatting to XP. Personally, I think they are the perfect choice for b-school, where you have to carry the laptop around all the time.

If you need processing power to churn through a video presentation, you can always get a quad core with latest graphics cards desktop or use the school's computer lab.

The X300 or macair is attractive, but at the $2K price tag, you can buy netbook and a beast of a desktop.
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PC vs Apple 26 Dec 2008, 18:29
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liubhs02
Personally, I think netbooks are the way to go. The Intel Atom processor is good enough to handle Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and is very energy efficient. The netbooks are light (~2 lb) and cheap (~$350), if you are willing to forgo a media drive and live with small screen real estate. Bonus, they don't even save you the effort of reformatting to XP. Personally, I think they are the perfect choice for b-school, where you have to carry the laptop around all the time.
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I considered netbooks until I did a thorough review.

Many netbooks are indeed satisfactory option for the usage mentioned above. However, they tend to freeze a lot. Also, because the processor and the memory configuration isn't adequate, it tends to slow down in performance significantly when many applications are open at the same time (i.e. - internet explorer, MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe Reader etc)

I think when it comes to laptops (unless you are willing to shell out $2500+ for top of the line Ultramobile laptops...) - it comes down to whether you want to purchase a light, mobile laptop vs. a more durable laptop with better battery life (hence heavier due to higher count in battery cells).
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PC vs Apple 27 Dec 2008, 06:08
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Kry, when am I finally gonna convince you to come over from the dark side and get on the Mac? :-D

I'm not sure of the exact percentages at Stanford, but I think ~30-40% of students use Macs. Both platforms (Mac and PC) are supported by the GSB's IT program, and Entourage automatically syncs with my GSB account and goes to my iPhone. So no problems there. The only potential issues arise with heavy-duty macro-dependent spreadsheet work. As I'm not hardcore into finance, these issues don't come up too frequently.
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PC vs Apple 27 Dec 2008, 11:25
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Dell is about to release their counter to Apple's MacBook Air.

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/2 ... d-by-dell/

Dell is already struggling against HP and losing overall market share. Is this a smart investment or another poor one?

Personally, even if Dell launches a successful counter version - Apple will probably launch a 2nd generation MacBook Air soon with many improvements....
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PC vs Apple 27 Dec 2008, 12:04
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terry12
Kry, when am I finally gonna convince you to come over from the dark side and get on the Mac? :-D

I'm not sure of the exact percentages at Stanford, but I think ~30-40% of students use Macs. Both platforms (Mac and PC) are supported by the GSB's IT program, and Entourage automatically syncs with my GSB account and goes to my iPhone. So no problems there. The only potential issues arise with heavy-duty macro-dependent spreadsheet work. As I'm not hardcore into finance, these issues don't come up too frequently.
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terry12 could you talk me into buying a Mac? :) I love how slick it is but I'm very concerned about compatibility issues.
If I install Windows on it (not in VMWare, but in a separate partition), would it become a fully compatible Windows platform or will there be issues? Also, would the trackpad fully work with all its functionalities?
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PC vs Apple 27 Dec 2008, 13:13
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MacBook AIR.....it's awesome:

+:
Real light, real fast

-:
Battery life sucks and you can't purchase an additional battery since the battery is internal.
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PC vs Apple 27 Dec 2008, 19:33
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monkbent
I run Office in VMWare (Parallels competitor) and it's not slow at all. Your problem is the Air only has 2GM RAM - if you're going to be virtualizing you really need 4GB. Anyhow, I definitely plan on sticking with the Mac...
Agreed. Vista screams on a 4GB, 2.4GHz MacBook running VMWare Fusion with 1GB dedicated.

ozzie123
I say, go with the one you like. Besides, PC vs Apple debate is a moot point now because both can run both OSes (albeit with some hacking for PC to run OSX).
For the love of god, nobody should be using OS X hacked on a PC for anything critical. I'm an avid contributor in the OSx86 community and have run OS X on dozens of PCs. You're asking for trouble if you want to do it on a machine that you must rely on 100% of the time.

As for Windows on a Mac, there are many ways to do it and they're all foolproof; Boot Camp makes a Mac a PC in every important way and VMWare is enterprise-quality and damn near bullet-proof.
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hi, on the topic of windows on a mac...what is preferable, boot camp or vmware? is there a useful website that could guide me through the process of installing/running windows on a mac?
thanks in advance.
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PC vs Apple 28 Dec 2008, 01:14
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ninkorn
Many netbooks are indeed satisfactory option for the usage mentioned above. However, they tend to freeze a lot. Also, because the processor and the memory configuration isn't adequate, it tends to slow down in performance significantly when many applications are open at the same time (i.e. - internet explorer, MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe Reader etc)
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Multi-tasking is definitely an issue with netbooks that are on limited RAM. However, if you use leaner programs: Google Chrome vs. IE, Open Office vs MS Office, Foxit PDF Reader vs Adobe Reader, it will alleviate some of the problems. If my current dinosaur of a laptop (1.6 GHz P4 from 2002) can handle those apps with ease, the Intel Atom should breeze through them.

If you wait until next year (when you matriculate), netbooks with Intel Atom dual core should be ready. It would be a bit more pricey, but much more delicious. Since XP uses less memory, 1 GB of RAM should be sufficient for the average multi-tasker, especially with some of Atom's unique memory/power saving techniques.

As far as the PC v Mac debate. I prefer PC because Mac's user friendliness makes it too dumbed down for me. I like being able to configure things to my exact taste, and I love my right-click.
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PC vs Apple 28 Dec 2008, 06:25
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terry12 could you talk me into buying a Mac? :) I love how slick it is but I'm very concerned about compatibility issues.
If I install Windows on it (not in VMWare, but in a separate partition), would it become a fully compatible Windows platform or will there be issues? Also, would the trackpad fully work with all its functionalities?
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Businessm, I run VMWare Fusion and haven't had any compatibility problems whatsoever. I'm not a heavy-duty computer user by any means, though. I haven't tried Boot Camp or Parallels, but friends who've tried those programs seem to like them. Based on his comments above, toploader might have some additional insights.
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kryzak
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PC vs Apple 29 Dec 2008, 15:13
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terry12
Kry, when am I finally gonna convince you to come over from the dark side and get on the Mac? :-D
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Somehow I think that's as likely as you switching to a PC. :P
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