Sonic'

Any ideas on which one I should go for ?

Cant decide between the two

and who has the best deals on at the moment

Requirements are as hi res as possible, so at least 1600 ideally 1900 screen res
Dual Hard drive capability
at least 2-3Gb Ram
decent gfx card
oh and firewire

Or should I buy a Mac

RichB

Macbook = 1 HDD / basic GFX and no 1600 (max 1280) but does have max 4gb RAM and FW.
Great little machine and can run a second screen upto 1920

Apple - MacBook - Technical Specifications

Depends whether you can switch to Mac OSX, it's so easy though. No more viruses (for now) but it will be more £££

Quidco offer 4 or 5% cashback from Apple store though and you can buy refurbs for quite a bit off.

If you can stretch to a Macbook Pro they are a great bit of kit, can run XP or Vista too with VMWare Fusion....

Sonic'

The software I use will only run on XP, but I can dual boot

I run Mac OSx86 (for a giggle) on my old Dell D610, so im used the Mac environment

staffs Mike

As I have had nothing but trouble with HP in the past few years to the point where their tech support actually said.. "Have you turned it off and back on again".. Yes.. "Dunno Then" And the fact that they always seem to forget they have your laptop if they take it for warranty work.. 4 seperate occasions, 4 different laptops.

But dell have been wonderful and the vostro's are very good laptops. Not quite as nice to use as the slightly older 1500/1700's but nice none the less Great true life screens as well.

Markus

Well you already know what I'm going to say

Seriously though, with the dual boot capability of a Macbook, I'd give it a serious look. I do know a couple of people who have a very small OS X partition, usually 10GB, and that's simply there to allow the download of any updates relating to bootcamp or the firmware of the machine itself. 99 percent of the time the machine is booted into XP and they are more than happy with it.

There is also the VM solution, but from the sound of it you'd want to run XP the majority of the time, so BootCamp might be better.

Iain Young

If you are using XP 99% of the time why buy a macbook? Surely it makes more sense to buy a windows based machine. It'll be cheaper for a start, and you'll likely get a better spec for the money.

Don't understand why anyone would buy a Mac to run XP, (unless they are suckers for a brand name)...

Anyway, another vote for Dell here. had a few of their desktops/laptops at work and at home now, and all have been superb machines.

RichB

"Don't understand why anyone would buy a Mac to run XP, (unless they are suckers for a brand name)..."
For once I agree with Iain!

Sonic'

Well I am getting next week a Dell Vostro 1510 with 1900 screen res and 3gb ram core 2 duo somthing or other and 250 Gb hard drive but that is what I spec'd up for me to use in work

If I got a Macbook, XP would only be run for audio recording (because the software I use doesnt run on Macos and never will, the rest of the time the laptop will be used for Photoshop etc, so would be Mac based

Im leaning towards a Vostro 1710 at the moment, due to the extra hard drive, and my old Dell D610 ive just found out has a 2nd hard drive caddy that replaces the DVD drive, which I have now ordered