I finally bit the bullet and bought a new laptop. While I technically had a Windows laptop it’s old, large and heavy, more luggable than portable. The deciding factor was about a month ago when I was away from home and my PC for an extended period and then I had a week long business trip planned.
I was looking for something small and easy to carry around. It didn’t need to have a lot of horsepower. I’d use it mainly for text, Internet access, watching video (or DVDs) when traveling and similar low intensity stuff.
I looked at Windows PCs but decided early on that they wouldn’t cut it. I’m primarily a Mac guy now so to use a Windows PC would have required buying or finding software to do everything I wanted. So while I would have spent less money for the hardware the additional software, time, effort would have added to the cost.
After that the decision was easy. I wanted to keep the cost down so I priced up the cheapest MacBook there was to see if it met my needs. It did. I considered a hard drive upgrade but decided to stay with the 80GB drive. I also looked at memory. It was cheaper to buy 2GB from Crucial than to buy the upgrade from Apple so I decided to hold off and wait to see if I needed it.
Well, shortly after ordering the MacBook I changed my mind and decided I wanted to be able to run VMs on the MacBook so I ordered the memory from Crucial. Upgrading the memory is a simple five minute process.
Complete specs can be found on my Quest Hardware page.
Initial Impressions
I got the MacBook the week before I was planning to travel on business so there wasn’t much time to get used to it. But my impressions so far are:
- I like the screen. I thought I might find the smaller size hard to deal with. But for what I use it for it’s just fine. The real estate isn’t big enough to watch a video and surf the net, other than that it’s clear and easy to read.
- I like the keyboard. I adjust to most keyboards but with a laptop it’s not like I can buy a new one. The keys are big enough and there’s enough travel when they’re struck. Now if I could just improve my typing.
- For a laptop I was surprised to see auto-login was enabled and the firewall was disabled. Since I’d be traveling with the laptop these seemed like bad ideas. So I reversed the settings.
- The Mac software I needed was either free, came with the MacBook or was covered by a license that let me install it on my laptop without needing another license.
I haven’t really stressed the MacBook yet, sticking to blogging, surfing, watching videos and text editing. White’s probably not a good color for me, we’ll have to see how long before the dirt starts showing up.
Popularity: 9% [?]
