Decisions Decisions....

Hey guys, I am new on here and I'm hopefully looking to get some input. I am going off to college soon and I was wondering what I should get for a notebook. I am basically deciding between the 15in MBP with i5 or i7 and an i5 or i7 PC. I use macbooks at school now, the school owns them, and so I'm comfortable on PC and MAC. The laptop will mostly be used for school work however, I do play some games like FSX and RTS games. If price isn't an issue, then what would you all recommend?

If price isn't an issue, get the most expensive machine you can afford.

nice dude....nice....helpful

What kind of games are you going for? Macs are not exactly game-friendly for the most part. The games available are very old compared to the ones available for PC. However, STEAM is supposed to come to Mac soon, so you could hold out for that.

You come onto a forum for Macs - are you expecting someone to tell you to go get a PC here? Look - when it comes to build quality you want to get a business class PC laptop. If you get a consumer class PC expect it to last 3-5 years if you are lucky. So once you decide to get a business class PC the price difference between a Mac and a PC isn't all that much. So then it comes down to OS preference. Windows 7 fixed a lot of problems but I'll tell you the multitouch mouse/trackpad is the best thing ever. Anyway - I chose the mac because now I have 3 choices of OS - Mac, Linux and Windows all run on a Mac. I play games on windows so I boot into bootcamp. I run engineering software so I have a virtual machine with linux. The 8 hour battery life is great and the solid build of the machine is great (It is now 10 hour battery life on the new MBPs). I haven't lost anything because I can still run all the OSes I need.

If you are looking at PCs look at Lenovo (thinkpad not ideadpad), Toshiba (business laptops) or Fujitsu (business laptops). Really try to make it match the Mac - you'll see it isn't that much cheaper. The problem with laptops is you move them around so you'll also want to price out the applecare vs warranty when you make your decision.

Thanks for the insight. I am pretty sure that if i get a mac then i will bootcamp windows 7 so i can still play some games. is bootcamp pretty stable bc i've heard some things that it wasn't? anyways i appreciate your input. thankyou

Bootcamp is fine. Parallels 5 works best compared to VMWare fusion 3 - seems snappier. I just upgraded to windows 7 from Vista and everything is much faster. In typical fashion I tried the upgrade and of course it wouldn't work without service pack one. So then I try to install service pack one onto vista - fails. So I try running a fix - well that messes up my login AND it still won't install service pack 1. So guess what - wipe and install 7. Nothing like trying to upgrade Windows to remind me why I switched to Mac.

Anyway, I digress, Vista worked fine on bootcamp and my initial impression of Windows 7 is that I am really impressed. Even with all the visuals turned on it still runs fast. I have to re-install games but if Vista ran the games - the way 7 runs I would expect the games to do fine under 7. I guess there is a reason they called Vista Windows Me two.