(Long-ish post, I do tend to go on. I apologise in advance!)
Hi, I was wondering if you could help. I currently have a very old laptop running windows (512mb/ram, P4 1.8ghz, onboard graphics, 30gb hd) running Windows XP. It's a number of years old (Probably approaching 4 years old now) and it's a bit beaten and battered. The power socket on the laptop actually fell off and I had to solder a bit of speaker cable to the board and to the adapter...but it works!
So I think I'm in the market for a new laptop, I can justify one and I'm debating a Mac. Previously I wouldn't have bothered, I love the Mac OS on the few occasions I've used it but there are still a number of windows applications that I use. Now that Macs can dual boot I feel I can finally shift (and use Mac OS in the main and ween myself off XP!).
I have a few questions though. The model I'm looking at is the one-up-from-bottom Macbook, with the 2ghz cpu, 1gb ram and 80gb harddrive. I intend to use it for:
Video Editing
Image Editing
General web browsing
Document Manipulation (essentially the office suite)
The odd occasional game but normally nothing released within the last 4 years!! (I'm currently playing through Grim Fandango, Theme Hospital and the 11th Hour!!)
and to carry it around with me (I frequently travel between my hometown and where I live).
Currently at home I have a network of:
1 x Desktop PC which I use to store the majority of my media
1 x Laptop (connected wirelessly)
1 x Xbox (Modded to use XBMC for video streaming)
1 x Xbox 360 (Connected to the network to allow streaming of HD content from my PC)
Having little to no knowledge of Mac OS, am i able to connect the Mac to this network and share files between all the machines? I presume this isn't a problem?
I also, at Christmas, got myself a nice new HD tv. Inputs on it include HDMI and VGA (amongst others), I note that you can get a DVI and VGA adapter for the output from the Macbook. Would I be best getting a DVI adapter and then a further DVI to HDMI adapter, or just flat out going for VGA? Would I lose any quality through VGA? I'm also not sure what resolutions the tv can happily display through the vga input (Samsung LE32R71) but browsing a few results on google shows people have little problem with it.
Which leads me on to the following question, a lot of the media I watch is encoded as h.264 .ts files (normally ranging from 1gb per tv show to 15gb upwards per movie) how would this play on the Macbook I intend to buy? Currently, as I said, I use my 360 for HD streaming but unfortunately it can't cope with h.264 encoding, the Macbook being able to play this without dropping frames/stuttering would be a massive boon to me.
And again, leading on from that, how is the wifi? I'm not honestly sure if streaming HD content over wifi would actually be possible anyway but I'd give it a shot. Failing this I assume that the Macbook comes with an ethernet socket (oddly I didn't find this mentioned!)?
Please understand the laptop won't be used for this all the time! It'd just be handy on the odd occasion I do fancy watching a HD film/show (annoyingly we get very few HD channels over here in the UK so to get the best out of my set I need to resort to this!).
Thank you very very much for any help.
Hi, I was wondering if you could help. I currently have a very old laptop running windows (512mb/ram, P4 1.8ghz, onboard graphics, 30gb hd) running Windows XP. It's a number of years old (Probably approaching 4 years old now) and it's a bit beaten and battered. The power socket on the laptop actually fell off and I had to solder a bit of speaker cable to the board and to the adapter...but it works!
So I think I'm in the market for a new laptop, I can justify one and I'm debating a Mac. Previously I wouldn't have bothered, I love the Mac OS on the few occasions I've used it but there are still a number of windows applications that I use. Now that Macs can dual boot I feel I can finally shift (and use Mac OS in the main and ween myself off XP!).
I have a few questions though. The model I'm looking at is the one-up-from-bottom Macbook, with the 2ghz cpu, 1gb ram and 80gb harddrive. I intend to use it for:
Video Editing
Image Editing
General web browsing
Document Manipulation (essentially the office suite)
The odd occasional game but normally nothing released within the last 4 years!! (I'm currently playing through Grim Fandango, Theme Hospital and the 11th Hour!!)
and to carry it around with me (I frequently travel between my hometown and where I live).
Currently at home I have a network of:
1 x Desktop PC which I use to store the majority of my media
1 x Laptop (connected wirelessly)
1 x Xbox (Modded to use XBMC for video streaming)
1 x Xbox 360 (Connected to the network to allow streaming of HD content from my PC)
Having little to no knowledge of Mac OS, am i able to connect the Mac to this network and share files between all the machines? I presume this isn't a problem?
I also, at Christmas, got myself a nice new HD tv. Inputs on it include HDMI and VGA (amongst others), I note that you can get a DVI and VGA adapter for the output from the Macbook. Would I be best getting a DVI adapter and then a further DVI to HDMI adapter, or just flat out going for VGA? Would I lose any quality through VGA? I'm also not sure what resolutions the tv can happily display through the vga input (Samsung LE32R71) but browsing a few results on google shows people have little problem with it.
Which leads me on to the following question, a lot of the media I watch is encoded as h.264 .ts files (normally ranging from 1gb per tv show to 15gb upwards per movie) how would this play on the Macbook I intend to buy? Currently, as I said, I use my 360 for HD streaming but unfortunately it can't cope with h.264 encoding, the Macbook being able to play this without dropping frames/stuttering would be a massive boon to me.
And again, leading on from that, how is the wifi? I'm not honestly sure if streaming HD content over wifi would actually be possible anyway but I'd give it a shot. Failing this I assume that the Macbook comes with an ethernet socket (oddly I didn't find this mentioned!)?
Please understand the laptop won't be used for this all the time! It'd just be handy on the odd occasion I do fancy watching a HD film/show (annoyingly we get very few HD channels over here in the UK so to get the best out of my set I need to resort to this!).
Thank you very very much for any help.
