Right I'm going to buy a Mac (quite a few questions)

[SamtheDrummer]

So I've finally saved up for a Macbook, I'll probably get the 13" 2.26 model then upgrade the hardrive and ram myself.
So;

1. Could you recommend a good hardrive and ram please, I'm in the UK.
http://www.dabs.com/products/hitachi-deskstar-p7k500-500gb-7200rpm-s300-16mb-3-5--4THP.html Would this be any good?

2. Bit of a vague question but, can you play any games on it? I mainly play on the ps3, but I do enjoy games such as Football manager and Empire: Total War would these run on it? If its been disscussed elsewhere links would be good

3. I'll need to put a copy of XP on to it unfortunatly and I think bootcamp is best for playing games, but if I bought parallels does this use the same partion as bootcamp or would I have to create a 3rd partition?

Thats all I can think of for the mo, many many thanks,
Sam

 

[spaceboots06]

So I've finally saved up for a Macbook, I'll probably get the 13" 2.26 model then upgrade the hardrive and ram myself.
So;

1. Could you recommend a good hardrive and ram please, I'm in the UK.
http://www.dabs.com/products/hitachi-deskstar-p7k500-500gb-7200rpm-s300-16mb-3-5--4THP.html Would this be any good?

2. Bit of a vague question but, can you play any games on it? I mainly play on the ps3, but I do enjoy games such as Football manager and Empire: Total War would these run on it? If its been disscussed elsewhere links would be good

3. I'll need to put a copy of XP on to it unfortunatly and I think bootcamp is best for playing games, but if I bought parallels does this use the same partion as bootcamp or would I have to create a 3rd partition?

Thats all I can think of for the mo, many many thanks,
Sam

2. Yes, you can play games. I'm not sure about the ones you mentioned but BattleField 2 runs well maxed out (excluding 8x aa) and CS:S and GMOD run well maxed out too. (excluding 16x aa) I can play the three games mentioned on 2x aa with like 60ish frames. That's good. You probably know what aa is but it just makes jagged edges less... well... jagged. 2x aa works perfectly for that. When you upgrade the RAM your games will work even better.

3. VM Ware can run off of the Boot Camp partition. It also has this nifty thing called unity where you can have Windows windows (ha) open in OS X.

 

[d0mth0ma5]

2. Bit of a vague question but, can you play any games on it? I mainly play on the ps3, but I do enjoy games such as Football manager and Empire: Total War would these run on it? If its been disscussed elsewhere links would be good

FM perfectly works, mine is running as I write this, with Empire : Total War your going to need to use Parallels or the like and by the looks of it the game requires 2.4 Ghz so the base model may not be sufficient (although I don't have it so maybe someone else could let you know for sure).

 

[SamtheDrummer]

2. Yes, you can play games. I'm not sure about the ones you mentioned but BattleField 2 runs well maxed out (excluding 8x aa) and CS:S and GMOD run well maxed out too. (excluding 16x aa) I can play the three games mentioned on 2x aa with like 60ish frames. That's good. You probably know what aa is but it just makes jagged edges less... well... jagged. 2x aa works perfectly for that. When you upgrade the RAM your games will work even better.

3. VM Ware can run off of the Boot Camp partition. It also has this nifty thing called unity where you can have Windows windows (ha) open in OS X.

AA Anti-Aliasing, yeh I know about that. Many thanks guys I'm really excited!

 

[Some Guy 555]

So I've finally saved up for a Macbook, I'll probably get the 13" 2.26 model then upgrade the hardrive and ram myself.
So;

1. Could you recommend a good hardrive and ram please, I'm in the UK.
http://www.dabs.com/products/hitachi-deskstar-p7k500-500gb-7200rpm-s300-16mb-3-5--4THP.html Would this be any good?

2. Bit of a vague question but, can you play any games on it? I mainly play on the ps3, but I do enjoy games such as Football manager and Empire: Total War would these run on it? If its been disscussed elsewhere links would be good

3. I'll need to put a copy of XP on to it unfortunatly and I think bootcamp is best for playing games, but if I bought parallels does this use the same partion as bootcamp or would I have to create a 3rd partition?

Thats all I can think of for the mo, many many thanks,
Sam

1. That hard drive will not work for a macbook as it is 3.5 inch and you need a 2.5 inch. But that is a good drive. I would recommend the scorpio blue from recent reviews by some people here. Its a 2.5 inch drive. I believe its 500GB @ 5400rpm and around $100... not sure what that is in your currency.

2. It will play those games for sure, however I am not sure if it will be able to max those games out and have great FPS.

3. I have never used parallels... so I don't know...

 

[harcosparky]

HDD ??

Make: Western Digital
Model: Scorpio Blue
Size: 500 GB

Do yourself a favor and read this report ----> http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010






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