I'm considering a handful of notebooks, one of them the higher end Macbook Pro config...
The GPU's the worst of anything I'm considering, but it's decent, and apparently AMD's normal drivers will install on it without hacks, so that's fine. Supposedly has HDCP too.
But anyway my main concern is the lack of Blu Ray...I'm just not going to do a computer in 2011 without Blu Ray. Wanted to know if anyone's found a solution that REALLY works well for an external drive-I'd install Windows 7 and PowerDVD or whatever on the software side, but need a drive that's reliable.
I'm very worried about external drives because I've tried THREE solutions so far on my current notebook, and none of them have worked. The first was I think a Lite-On USB Blu Ray drive...just intermittently wouldn't work, cut out multiple times an hour, where the computer just stopped being able to see it.
Next I tried a Sony internal drive in an external USB enclosure...the drive's fine, but the enclosure was just flaky, and got worse and worse over time until it basically would never read.
Next I tried a USB/eSATA enclosure...and after a few weeks it stopped working even on eSATA.
Note that I do NOT have any other issues ever with external Seagate drives which I use regularly, multiple iPods, all sorts of other USB devices, so I'm fairly sure this is the enclosure's being junk, not the computer.
So before I'd get a Macbook Pro I want to know there's something that is absolutely positively just as reliable as an internal drive, just bullet proof.
Any suggestions, or are these just flaky as a category? (Wish it was big companies doing the controller chips...get rid of this JMicro stuff and lets get some Intel or whatever!)
The GPU's the worst of anything I'm considering, but it's decent, and apparently AMD's normal drivers will install on it without hacks, so that's fine. Supposedly has HDCP too.
But anyway my main concern is the lack of Blu Ray...I'm just not going to do a computer in 2011 without Blu Ray. Wanted to know if anyone's found a solution that REALLY works well for an external drive-I'd install Windows 7 and PowerDVD or whatever on the software side, but need a drive that's reliable.
I'm very worried about external drives because I've tried THREE solutions so far on my current notebook, and none of them have worked. The first was I think a Lite-On USB Blu Ray drive...just intermittently wouldn't work, cut out multiple times an hour, where the computer just stopped being able to see it.
Next I tried a Sony internal drive in an external USB enclosure...the drive's fine, but the enclosure was just flaky, and got worse and worse over time until it basically would never read.
Next I tried a USB/eSATA enclosure...and after a few weeks it stopped working even on eSATA.
Note that I do NOT have any other issues ever with external Seagate drives which I use regularly, multiple iPods, all sorts of other USB devices, so I'm fairly sure this is the enclosure's being junk, not the computer.
So before I'd get a Macbook Pro I want to know there's something that is absolutely positively just as reliable as an internal drive, just bullet proof.
Any suggestions, or are these just flaky as a category? (Wish it was big companies doing the controller chips...get rid of this JMicro stuff and lets get some Intel or whatever!)
