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- May 19, 2011
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I am new here and new to Apple Macs, so please be patient and bear with me.
I have been retired for 8 years. Before you ask, yes I do have a bus pass! I spent 40 years as an aircraft engineer and then retrained as a network engineer and system builder and also built PCs for local people and also for the small company I worked for. This IT experience lasted for 6 years. Therefore I consider myself a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
I have a small network at home that has a QNAP 439 Pro server where I store all my files including my music and photos that go back to the 1970s. I have a PC that I built myself for my general word processing etc. I also use it a lot for Flight Sim games. It is an i7 920 with 6GB RAM (with nVidia 460 GTX) overclocked with Windows 7 x 64 with many other peripherals hanging off it. To get a fast Windows boot up, I upgrade it to an Intel 160GB SSD, but store games and other programs on a 500GB normal HD. I use a 24" Benq monitor running at 1900 x 1200.
After giving you my background, here is the reason for me joining the forum and asking for advice.
I have started going on holiday for a month at a time to places such as Thailand and wish to purchase a laptop for traveling and use in hotels or anywhere (airports) where I can get a connection be it Ethernet or WiFi. The more I looked in my local stores (Curry's Dixon's Comet and PC World) the more I became confused, because I could see that there was a vast range of laptops available to me. The small laptops do not cut the mustard and I need to have a 13" screen because of my eyesight using bifocals or VDU glasses. Anything bigger becomes too heavy and cumbersome and will defeat the object of being transportable and easy to use.
After talking to sales people over several days they advise me instead of going for a laptop such as the following:
Asus U30S review – top pick 13 inch laptop
They say I should seriously consider the Apple MC700B/A 13" MacBook Pro. However, when start asking the "sales" people there are many questions that they just cannot answer, so here goes.
a. I have 8 (eight) email addresses that I need to keep track of and answer. Can I do this on the mail client on MacBook Pro? If not I can use the Thunderbird email client.
b. I spend a lot of time using Microsoft's remote access client to monitor and sort out problems on a windows 2008 server. Is there a program on the MacBook Pro to do this? If not which program if any would be suitable?
c. I have a Panasonic compact DMC TZ10 camera that is perfect for traveling and produces AVCHD Lite video 720P files. The files are (*.mts). These will be on the SDHC card on the camera, so I presume I can copy these across to the MacBook Pro?
d. Can I edit or join the file video clips together to produce a longer video file using the supplied Apple software?
e. Do I need to convert them to another file format on the MacBook Pro before doing the cutting/joining/editing? If so, what is a suitable program?
These are just a few questions that hopefully some kind person(s) can answer and I am sure there will be more.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to replies.
I have been retired for 8 years. Before you ask, yes I do have a bus pass! I spent 40 years as an aircraft engineer and then retrained as a network engineer and system builder and also built PCs for local people and also for the small company I worked for. This IT experience lasted for 6 years. Therefore I consider myself a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
I have a small network at home that has a QNAP 439 Pro server where I store all my files including my music and photos that go back to the 1970s. I have a PC that I built myself for my general word processing etc. I also use it a lot for Flight Sim games. It is an i7 920 with 6GB RAM (with nVidia 460 GTX) overclocked with Windows 7 x 64 with many other peripherals hanging off it. To get a fast Windows boot up, I upgrade it to an Intel 160GB SSD, but store games and other programs on a 500GB normal HD. I use a 24" Benq monitor running at 1900 x 1200.
After giving you my background, here is the reason for me joining the forum and asking for advice.
I have started going on holiday for a month at a time to places such as Thailand and wish to purchase a laptop for traveling and use in hotels or anywhere (airports) where I can get a connection be it Ethernet or WiFi. The more I looked in my local stores (Curry's Dixon's Comet and PC World) the more I became confused, because I could see that there was a vast range of laptops available to me. The small laptops do not cut the mustard and I need to have a 13" screen because of my eyesight using bifocals or VDU glasses. Anything bigger becomes too heavy and cumbersome and will defeat the object of being transportable and easy to use.
After talking to sales people over several days they advise me instead of going for a laptop such as the following:
Asus U30S review – top pick 13 inch laptop
They say I should seriously consider the Apple MC700B/A 13" MacBook Pro. However, when start asking the "sales" people there are many questions that they just cannot answer, so here goes.
a. I have 8 (eight) email addresses that I need to keep track of and answer. Can I do this on the mail client on MacBook Pro? If not I can use the Thunderbird email client.
b. I spend a lot of time using Microsoft's remote access client to monitor and sort out problems on a windows 2008 server. Is there a program on the MacBook Pro to do this? If not which program if any would be suitable?
c. I have a Panasonic compact DMC TZ10 camera that is perfect for traveling and produces AVCHD Lite video 720P files. The files are (*.mts). These will be on the SDHC card on the camera, so I presume I can copy these across to the MacBook Pro?
d. Can I edit or join the file video clips together to produce a longer video file using the supplied Apple software?
e. Do I need to convert them to another file format on the MacBook Pro before doing the cutting/joining/editing? If so, what is a suitable program?
These are just a few questions that hopefully some kind person(s) can answer and I am sure there will be more.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to replies.