H
Hyperluminal
Guest
Recently I've been thinking about switching to the Mac, and I've got a few questions.
First of all, a little over 2 years ago I got very fed up with Dell, and their lack of any real regard to quality of customer support (I was having a nasty problem with my Dell laptop, and long story short, it took 8 months and many, many wasted hours on the phone to finally get my PC replaced). At that time, I decided to buy a 12" iBook. The problem was, I got a pretty cheap one, so it was slow (600 MHz G3), and the screen was just too small and low res. So I returned it.
When Dell did eventually replace my PC a few months later, to their credit, they gave me a top of the line system, which was worth much more than my original PC was worth, even when it was new. Anyway, that PC is now almost 2 years old, and since it's been pretty annoying at times too, I'm interested in getting a Mac again. I just have a few questions.
I'm interested in probably getting a 15" 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4.
First of all, one problem that I have is that with Windows, a program can basically bring the system to a grinding halt by just using the CPU to full capacity; this can happen when doing a Photoshop filter, or even when burning a CD. It can get so slow that the OS barely responds until the process finishes. And it happens with fresh XP installations; it definitely isn't software. My PC is pretty powerful too-- it's a laptop with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM. It seems ridiculous for a modern OS to allow this to happen.. my question is, does this happen on OS X? C'mon, you can be honest...
Another thing is, would the 1.33 GHz G4 be enough? I don't need something especially fast, just basically for it to be at least somewhat faster than my 2.0.
Also, I've heard that the aluminum on the PB's palmrest can sometimes corrode from sweat, over time. Is that at all true?
And what kind of battery life do they get, in real world use? One of the nice things about my big Dell is that you can put in 2 batteries at once; when I first got it, I could get up to 4 hours of use, although now it's more like 2.5. Although if the PB comes with the kind of adapter that my iBook had-- where you can remove the large AC cable and snap on a little travel adapter with fold-in prongs to plug the power brick directly into the wall-- that'd be a big step in the right direction.
First of all, a little over 2 years ago I got very fed up with Dell, and their lack of any real regard to quality of customer support (I was having a nasty problem with my Dell laptop, and long story short, it took 8 months and many, many wasted hours on the phone to finally get my PC replaced). At that time, I decided to buy a 12" iBook. The problem was, I got a pretty cheap one, so it was slow (600 MHz G3), and the screen was just too small and low res. So I returned it.
When Dell did eventually replace my PC a few months later, to their credit, they gave me a top of the line system, which was worth much more than my original PC was worth, even when it was new. Anyway, that PC is now almost 2 years old, and since it's been pretty annoying at times too, I'm interested in getting a Mac again. I just have a few questions.
I'm interested in probably getting a 15" 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4.
First of all, one problem that I have is that with Windows, a program can basically bring the system to a grinding halt by just using the CPU to full capacity; this can happen when doing a Photoshop filter, or even when burning a CD. It can get so slow that the OS barely responds until the process finishes. And it happens with fresh XP installations; it definitely isn't software. My PC is pretty powerful too-- it's a laptop with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM. It seems ridiculous for a modern OS to allow this to happen.. my question is, does this happen on OS X? C'mon, you can be honest...
Another thing is, would the 1.33 GHz G4 be enough? I don't need something especially fast, just basically for it to be at least somewhat faster than my 2.0.
Also, I've heard that the aluminum on the PB's palmrest can sometimes corrode from sweat, over time. Is that at all true?
And what kind of battery life do they get, in real world use? One of the nice things about my big Dell is that you can put in 2 batteries at once; when I first got it, I could get up to 4 hours of use, although now it's more like 2.5. Although if the PB comes with the kind of adapter that my iBook had-- where you can remove the large AC cable and snap on a little travel adapter with fold-in prongs to plug the power brick directly into the wall-- that'd be a big step in the right direction.