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What do you guys think of this build for a college student MacBook?

Entourage12 said:
I'm really new to Macs but i've been doing some crazy reading about them and I just have a couple things to ask. I have heard that if I get WoW for windows and play it on windows that the graphics will be better than on leopard? And I have also read that if I get Windows XP it will not read all 4gb of RAM, instead only 3gb of them?


Another question now: My parents are allowing me to spend $2,000 on this new laptop, I really didn't expect to get the price so low. Now I have about an extra $300 to spend. Where do you suggest I put it? New hard drive?
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how about you give it back to your parents? I'm sure they'd appreciate the gesture after they've just given you the money.
 
dmarch said:
I just got my daughter a new blackbook for University yesterday. You should have seen her face when I took out my tools and stripped out the memory and hard drive before she even got to play with it. She's now ready for the next 4 years with 320GB HDD and 2 Gig of RAM.
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Holy ****! 320GB for a MacBook? O-o-o-o-ovvvvverkill (C-c-c-combo-breaker!)

Sorry, I'm just not used to those sized hard drives in Apple notebooks.
 
Entourage12 said:
Thanks alot for the help guys I would definately look into getting the software at school and see what they can do. Also, I forgot to mention I wanted to get the 4gb of RAM for a little bit of minor gaming, like at most World of Warcraft and maybe some old fps shooters
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A lot of people think World of Warcraft is not a very intensive game that will run on pretty much any reasonably new computer. And they are right. IF That computer has a real graphics card. Which the Macbook does not. I have talked to a buddy with a Macbook, and while it will work for running around town checking the AH, its not going to be terribly playable otherwise, and certainly not in raid/instance situations. Basically, the Macbook CANNOT play ANY games that require much in the way of 3D acceleration.

If you want to play WoW, you need a Macbook Pro. Otherwise, you'd better have a PC you use for gaming.

Also as for MS Office. If your classes require you to turn in assignments in Word .DOC format (and most do), I'd get Office. I haven't used iWork, but unless the translation is always perfect, I wouldn't want to turn in something exported from iWork. You don't want some kind of formatting to be off in that all important report you just turned in.
 
I started university last august with a brand new 2.16 blackbook with just 1 gb of ram with the intent of buying 2gb from Crucial. I do the normal stuff, write papers, do work processing, iTunes, iChat, etc... But I also dabble in light movie production and web design with the Adobe suite. In all honesty man, I haven't really felt that I've -needed- to upgrade it to 2gb of ram to really get some work done. I've been floating along with only 1gb for a while now, (though I'm going to order that 2 gb soon mainly because it's so cheap now.) and it's been serving me great.

What I'm trying to say is that unless you're really gonna be crunching some hardcore tasks, 4gb would be overkillllll imho. You can get 2Gb of ram from crucial for your 'book for about $50 now. That'd be enough probably. Save the money for books or something.

And definitely look into your schools discounts, I bought office 04 for... $15 and Win XP professional for about $10. C H E A P.
 
pretty decent dude. personally id run vista through vm ware fusion, you can get it off tpb, along with vista. dont waste the cash, especially as a secondary OS
 
Consider a refurbished to save yourself some more money! Then keep the other 300 plus the 100 from getting a refurbished machine and buy a decent external display!
 
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