A Few Questions

Hey everybody. I've finally been told i can get a 17" power book. This is going to be my first apple computer and i just have a few questions. First off i wanted to know some stuff about the waranty. does anyone know if it will be voided if i open it up and put my own ram in? my other question is if my external hard drive which i use with my laptop will work with it. it is a usb 2.0 160gb maxtor drive and came with a disc to run on macs. does anyone know if i will still be able to use it with my pc? thanks all.

oh and also on http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ says that the power books are due for another upgrade soon....possibley dual g4s and i was wondering if anyone thinks that will happen anytime soon

It's PowerBook, not Power Book, just so you know

The warranty doesn't get voided if you open it up to put extra RAM in. This is because you only have to open one panel to get to the RAM, you don't have to open the whole case. Another ingenious innovation from Apple.

You'll have to partition your hard drive as far as I know, because one section will have to be fat-32 and the other will have to be Apple. Once you do this, you can run it on both Macs and PCs. As far as I know. But I don't know much about external hard drives, sorry

Get the PowerBook 17".

Oh, Apple has stated again and again that there won't be a G5 upgrade until at least 2005. Considering Apple upgraded the PowerBooks considerably at the beginning of summer, I dont think they'll upgrade them to G5's until at least 2005. As for dual G4s in a PowerBook, no notebook ever (even Windows ones) has ever been dual-processor. Considering a single G4 chip runs hot as it is, I don't think Apple will ever fit 2 G4 chips in a PowerBook. Although that'd be wicked fast, I admit

Trust me, PowerBooks won't be upgraded until at least next year. Probably later than Q1.

Get the 17", it ROCKS! Good luck!

I have heard that apple is upgrading the powerbooks to 1.5 and 1.8 ghz respectively between now and the first of the yer, but that is pure apple rumor. Get it now, waiting sucks, and you won't be disapointed