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This Windows laptop or a Mac?

T

trip1ex

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 10, 2008
3,345
2,100
Last night I took a step towards the darkside.

I bought an i5 15" Samsung laptop with a 330M Nvidia 1gb gpu, 4gb ram, 500gb hard drive, bluetooth, wireless N, speakers, webcam, hdmi ports, and 2/2 usb3/usb2 ports among other ports, plus LED screen.

And Windows 7 with supposedly not much bloatware.

All for $730. PLus they gave me a $100 Amazon gift card.


I ask you MacRumor readers. Oh unbiased ones that you are.

Should I stick with this purchase or drop it like a bad habit?

Part of me says I should stick with this purchase if only to sample the competition and become more informed about it. I will still have my 2009 iMac.

The other part says it is just going to be one big hassle so don't bother.
 
Ah, buyer's remorse.

If you thought about it long and hard before the purchase, then stick with it. Heck, even if it was an impulsice purchase, stick with it. The "dark side" is not so dark once one has spent time there. Better you find what works best for you than be one of those "stone throwers" who can only belittle the other side (this applies to both sides of the PC paradigm). If you "become" a PC, good on you. If you come back to Mac, we'll be here for you.
 
Sounds like a powerful machine for a reasonable price. What hassle are you talking about? Is it too big for your current bag?
 
Depends on what you're using it for, Me personally I'm happy with Windows. Used it most of my life, Had to use a Mac at College for 2 years for Video Editing and Photoshop, but it endlessly crashed on me, which put me off OS X. Similarly my friend who has a Mac, says Windows endlessly crashes on him, and that his Mac never crashes.

In the end it comes down to what OS you prefer to use.
 
For the price I think you got a good deal. I recently helped an older family member buy a computer. I ended up helping her buy a Lenovo laptop for $350. I cleaned off all the crap and now she has a computer that meets her needs perfectly for very little money.

Everyone has different needs and instead of getting caught up in the Apple is the best hype buy what works for you.
 
I find it difficult to recommend a Windows laptop but it all comes down to what works for you.

I hastily belt sanded away XP from my Acer Aspire One and now that it's been supplanted by my iPad, I find myself ordering a restore disk from Acer so I can put XP back to sell the AAO.

There are a handful of things that I find work better under OS X. One is turning off the trackpad when a BT or usb mouse is present. On my Dell E6400, with it's questionable trackpad drivers, this feature simply doesn't work in XP or in 7. On my Macs, it works flawlessly. Another annoyance is the popup to tell me my bluetooth is not discoverable. I can't find a way to tell Windows I really don't care and never want to be told again. Nothing remotely like this occurs on OS X. Another annoyance is when "recent places" populates by moving the item I'm trying to click on as I'm trying to click it whereas Spotlight in OS X almost always instantly gives me exactly what I'm looking for. But in the end these are little things and while it's not my first choice, if you need to use Windows for a reason, by all means go for it.
 
For a net price of $630, sounds pretty good to me.

You don't mention what you plan to use it for, so it is hard to determine if it was a good idea. Win7 is pretty good, so from an OS standpoint, it is about as good as you can get outside of OS X.
 
Sounds okay. Worse case, if Windows doesn't work, you can throw Linux on it. Or both for that matter. The only thing that turned me off from Windows laptops as of late has been the resolution. The cheaper [$$] models tend to sport low res, and Windows or Linux just looks to chunky...
 
Windows PCs have almost 0 resale value and after 1-2 years are basically useless.

On the upside you did not purchase a Dell or HP that are crap computers. I sold my 4 year old macbook (white core 2 duo) on craigslist for 650 a couple months ago :), that also has to do with people being dumb and really wanting apple products. That computer suprisingly still worked just like if it was brand new just the battery was starting to suck, and I really wanted the 10 hr battery of the new pro.

For $630 net you basically paid half of what a Macbook pro 13 would have cost, in 2 years time when your samsung is useless you can buy an even better samsung hopefully for the same amount.

I never had a Samsung computer before but their tvs are excellent. I did have Sony Viaos growing up and I loved them, it wasn't a Mac but pretty much the best your going to get from a PC, tho that was 5-6 years ago.

It comes down to what you really need it for, how good you are at removing all the little bugs and things that slow down pcs, and if your Cool with not having a Mac haha. Buy with the money you saved you can buy yourself a decent Samsung tv :)
 
i think this is the laptop he is talking about. For $630 dollars you got a terrfic deal. The features rival even the MBP in terms of specs.
 
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emiljan said:
i think this is the laptop he is talking about. For $630 dollars you got a terrfic deal. The features rival even the MBP in terms of specs.
Click to expand...

Yes that's it.

Guess power per dollar finally got me to take a stab at Windows again for the first time in 5 years.

The urge to play a pc game or two once in awhile had something to do with it.

And I needed a 2nd and maybe will need a 3rd machine for the family at a price I could better afford.
 
Last edited:
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