Friday, August 04, 2006

Summer 2006



I'm not less than 2 weeks away from starting through in East Lothian and so far my attempts at finding a place to live have not been very successful. I've been to see the council who have said I wouldn't qualify for priority housing with them but would help me find somewhere privately,

I've been to see some flatshares in Edinburgh and nothing's really got my interest that much. So the plan is to stay with family up ubtil the september weekend and just come back home at weekends so we'll see how well that works.

In light of the fact that i'll practically be homeless i've been considering the merits of buying a laptop so that I have my own workstations wherever I am the question is which one should I go for, On the one hand there's windows based machines, all seem to be decent but none have really caught my eye and on the other hand there's the shiny all singing and dancing macbook. I've never owned a mac but have been impressed by them over the last year even in the face of chris shouting "Click the right mouse button" when anything went wrong in a presentation.

The only issue was the price however by the time I personalised the windows laptops they were about the same price and the processor wasn't as strong so anyone got any advice???

Not much else to say right now, i'll have more educational thoughts the week I start back, until then I'm gonna enjoy this holiday.

3 comments:

David said...

You could buy a Mac laptop which has an Intel inside (bing, bing, bing-bing!). There are then at least two solutions that will allow you to run Windoze on the Mac if you need it - Apple's Bootcamp and Parallels virtual PC. As a Windows machine, the Macs are not going to set the heather alight - for example you can forget playing any Quake type games. However, you will get a well-specced and powerful Macintosh with the added bonus of being able to get screenshots for worksheets and the ability to run Windoze only software if you really need it.

However (and it pains me to say this) since your school is Windoze based, it might be easier just to go for a Windoze laptop. Partly it will depend on how much Windoze specific software you think you will need to run. If you think it will mostly be Microsoft Office and the Internet, the the Intel Macs will do the business. If the school uses a lot of Windoze specific stuff, it might be easier to go for a real Windoze laptop - let's face it, there are enough problems getting some programs to work under Windoze without throwing a virtual machine into the mix!

In the end though, you pay the money, so you have to make the choice! :-)

Duncan__ said...

Hey -- welcome back! I thought your blog had disappeared for a few weeks there.

(Sorry -- no advice on laptops. I haven't even got my iPod yet, for those loooong commutes.)

David said...

So... have you got somewhere to stay? Have you got a new laptop? How is it going? Your reading public awaits...