boxst

I'm looking for a second-hand Macbook for my wife as we have gone over the the dark side (light side perhaps ?) for other things and her (Dell) laptop unfortunately gave up at the weekend.

Around £400 seems get a core-duo 2ghz Macbook 13.3".

A couple of questions though:

What to look for?

Some adverts (on Gumtree) state a year or so left on Applecare, is is worth the extra they want to charge for this?

Any other help appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

Ant

AppleCare is definetly worth it

boxst

How can I check the validity of Applecare?

I doubt there is any paperwork in this day and age? (I sound old)

Ant

Ask the seller for serial then put it in here.

https://selfsolve.apple.com/GetWarranty.do

BlobEyedRex

Fully agree with the above when it comes to Apple hardware get the extended care, I didn't with my newer macbook pro and 2 weeks back the replacement optical drive which was replaced within 6 months of original purchase, failed again but now cost me £117. Care seems expensive but compared to hardware costs it is cheap they mentioned when i took mine in it might now be the motherboard thats failed but i was lucky it was the optical drive again as motherboard was £800

But Os-x on the other hand is top notch so much better than windows & even beats Linux for overall useability and application support

boxst

Well, I bought one for my wife for £380 in the end. 1.5 years old, dual-core 2ghz, slight hairline crack in the case and Applecare until April 2012.

I find Mac OSX incredibly irritating to use as I'm the 'expert' and showing my wife how to get the best from her Mac.

I miss the right hand mouse button to do things like cut & paste.

Steve

JackClark

Put two fingers on the trackpad and click. Tada!! You might have to enable that in Preferences but I think it's default now.

Ant

Like jack said or control and click

vash

Or just go into settings and find the touch pad bit and turn on right click.. Simps!

Markus

Well effing put Windows on it, and / or dual-boot it

As others have said, mouse system prefs should allow for right click functionality.

BlobEyedRex

I find Mac OSX incredibly irritating to use as I'm the 'expert' and showing my wife how to get the best from her Mac.

[/quote]

Other option if you've got a local apple store is to book some time for the missues with the genius's as they put it, as they do courses in store for those new to OS-X & should cover all she needs to know to do stuff on the Mac

If your new to OS-X (& linux/Unix file system) then Bootcamp (dual boot) can be a pain to setup as well, as it usually chooses the volume to format for windows as your Os-x volume so care needs to be taken to recognize right volume, and just a case of installing windows boot camp drivers from OS-X install disk

But bootcamp works better than running parallels as i gave up on that & went bootcamp as parallels started good then got worse over the years

boxst

I will try the touchpad changes, thank you and also the genius bar for my wife.

I'm not new to Unix, used to program on Sun Solaris but got used to Windows being both friendly with the ability to get under the covers relatively easily.

On the MacBook I had to enable root, login, to change the directory name to match the new user (my wife), log out, disable root again etc...

Steve

BlobEyedRex

I used to be in IT for the last 20 years, Designer/Architect mainly wintel & VMware but most of the market data systems were running on either Sun or HP UX kit, so got to play around with unix as well