Getting a Laptop...

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Now for endless hours of software installation

So the iBook is a good computer to buy? I am going to get one soon, but I can't decide between the 14 inch iBook or the 12 inch PowerBook---and the MacBook Pro is completely out of my price range, since I don't really do anything on a computer but write and surf the web and cannot justify spending over $2000 for a computer at the moment.

I'm pleased with the 14" ibook so far. The only thing that is joke on it are the speakers, but I guess that's probably true on most laptops. Since my vision isn't all that good, even with glasses, one of the things I looked at was pixels per inch on the screen. I don't know where my calculations are now but I seem to remember that the pixels weren't much smaller on the 14" ibook than my old 12" Dell since the ibook was 1024x768 and the Dell was 800x600. I then compared this to the 15" powerbook and found that the pixels were much smaller on that unit.

It's nice to have both ethernet and wireless built in, I had to swap PCMCIA cards in my Dell. In addition to Opera, Firefox, Skype, Adobe Reader, WMP, and Google Earth I also installed Virtual PC with Windows 2000 for some work programs like Delphi.

whats the performance like for Win 2000 running under the iBook ?

Im thinking of getting a Mac for music production, but havent really decided yet.

It's acceptable for what I need to do. Screen redraw time is quite a bit slower, I notice that on one of my programs that displays realtime waveform data from a seismic recorder. I wouldn't try to do any multimedia type stuff on it. I ran a few tests using Delphi 5 and a couple of the programs I've written with it on both a 1.2Ghz athlon (PC) and the 1.4Ghz G4 using Virtual PC (VPC):

Build large program: 1-2seconds (PC), 5 seconds (VPC)
Start large program: <1 second (PC), 4 seconds (VPC)
Download compressed seismic data from fairly slow data logger (which I think is where much of the time is coming from), decompress, and graph: 19 seconds (PC), 21 seconds (VPC)
Same data as above, by apply IIR filter: 6 seconds (PC), 9 seconds (VPC)

So it all depends on what you are doing. If the program is waiting for you, or for another computer for a significant amount of time, then the speed difference isn't that great.

Note that there are a number of PC emulators. I also tried the cheaper "Guest PC" but it was really too slow to be useful for my purposes, especially screen redraw time.

Virtual PC (from Micro$oft) can be bought with either Win 2000 or XP, people recommend 2000 since XP is so much more bloated. If you have specific questions you might try this forum:

http://www.macforumz.com/modules.php?na ... Virtual-PC