New PC/Mac.......which?

I guess you have to ask yourself, what are you getting for the extra money? And it it worth it?

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Originally Posted by Sleeper

The only real difference is that Macs arent as likely to brakedown, though they still can, on you and that all the little effects on Vista eat up a huge amount of RAM. Unless your out to make music/videos sort of thing, it doesnt matter too much if you know what you want in it.

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Vista eats up a huge amount of RAM because of prefetch which makes your PC launch apps faster :) RAM is dead cheap these days anyway. I have 4gb and my next PC will probably have double that and perhaps even some more :)

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Vista eats up a huge amount of RAM because of prefetch which makes your PC launch apps faster :) RAM is dead cheap these days anyway. I have 4gb and my next PC will probably have double that and perhaps even some more :)

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Not sure what this prefetch thing is but I know that my college's tech guy saved 700mb of RAM on a computer with Vista when he turned off all of those little niceties that it has. My computer at home doesnt even have 700mb of RAM!

For what it's worth, I used to use Macs at work, so bought a MacBook early last year to ensure compatability - now I have a PC at work, but have kept the MacBook. I find the Mac OS a bit more 'intuitive' in terms of some of the commands, but have got used to the PC as well and quite like it.

My concern about the MacBook would be the build quality. I would hope that it's been improved over the previous model, as I have had to have the screen replaced (and not because of the logic board problem that is apparently a well-known fault - mine was just buggered) and now part of the plastic bit in front of the keys is coming away, also a fault others I know have experienced. In summary, lovely OS, iffy build.

The new Macbook is made from a solid aluminium block - it certainly looks good.

I used to be a PC zealot, but I was given a Macbook Pro for work and now I'm a convert. And for one simple reason - Macs just work. Everything works how it should do with minimal faffing around with lots of 3rd-party software.

The new Macbooks (Pro and normal) are of very good build quality and are of quite a high spec - in fairness they are quite expensive but their battery life is superb (around 5 hours) and they're quite light and small compared to the big-name PC laptops.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Vista eats up a huge amount of RAM because of prefetch which makes your PC launch apps faster :) RAM is dead cheap these days anyway. I have 4gb and my next PC will probably have double that and perhaps even some more :)

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I hope you are using Vista 64-bit otherwise anything above 3GB or RAM is absolutely useless.

3GB of RAM of course. Stupid fingers!

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Originally Posted by Andrewmcm

I hope you are using Vista 64-bit otherwise anything above 3GB or RAM is absolutely useless.

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Of course :) I'm somewhat offended someone has even asked :p

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Originally Posted by Sleeper

Not sure what this prefetch thing is but I know that my college's tech guy saved 700mb of RAM on a computer with Vista when he turned off all of those little niceties that it has. My computer at home doesnt even have 700mb of RAM!

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"Saved" RAM eh?

In ye olde days the more RAM you had free the better your PC would generally perform. But what Vista does is load your most commonly used programs into the RAM which means that when you want to load a program it loads quicker becuase it's already in your RAM which is faster than your loading the program from your hard drive (which is slow) into your RAM which is fast. I'm at work now but when I typed that post before my PC was probably using 3gb of RAM of so just caching commonly used files. 3gb with just itunes, a couple of IE7 windows and Messenger open might sound crazy but it works oh so well and is ever so punchy when it comes to performance.

RAM is cheap these days. There is absolutely no reason to have any less than 4gb in your PC. You might not need it but it's bloody cheap and your PC will run that much better for it.