I am a recent 'switcher' and I must admit, I love my new imac! I would also love to replace my work laptop with a 15" powerbook, but I am concerned with a couple of issues. I use my laptop for MS Office applications, accessing IBM mainframe databases, my Lotus Notes email, and my work's VPN when on the road. I'll have multiple pages of these apps open at the same time, so the mulitasking abilities of the powerbook would be perfect. However, these apps are not availalble for the mac from work, except for office, which I have. I would assume that I could use virtual pc for these other apps, but I don't know how well the powerbook would perform under these conditions. Would virtual pc cause the powebook to slow to a crawl? I would LOVE to buy a powerbook, but I don't know if I could use one in my situation. Any assistance with this would be appreciated!
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I want to buy a powerbook for work but...
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VPC works great with Notes, though on my PBti 1.0Gb/1GB RAM there's little speed difference between Notes via VPC and Notes via the Mac. There is a Mac client for Lotus Notes that **kinda** works, but it's really sluggish and the fonts needs a haxie before you can read them.
If your using Notes just for email, you can get away without the Notes client entirely. My company uses Notes. I pop the Notes server using OS X's mail client, Mail.app and send the same way. I connect remotely to our network using the built-in VPN abilities of OS X.
The only fly in the ointment is accessing these IBM mainframe databases. If it's some kind of AS400-type machine, you're screwed with a Mac, AFAIK.
Hope that helps.
If your using Notes just for email, you can get away without the Notes client entirely. My company uses Notes. I pop the Notes server using OS X's mail client, Mail.app and send the same way. I connect remotely to our network using the built-in VPN abilities of OS X.
The only fly in the ointment is accessing these IBM mainframe databases. If it's some kind of AS400-type machine, you're screwed with a Mac, AFAIK.
Hope that helps.
