No fanboi here, just a geek who wanted a powerful laptop that could be
used for modern games and didn't look unprofessional in a business
environment.
When I bought my Mac in December 2009, I was at a point where I was
getting ready to do the full re-install on a 5-year-old Dell Inspiron
(failed drive), and decided to not make the investment of time in the
old hardware. With the recent MacBook Pro systems (in unibody form), I
finally found what I wanted - a good, UNIX-based laptop with a
competent GUI and all the above features that were missing from too
many of the PC laptops. That it was a "Mac" didn't matter much to me.
I do dual-boot it into Windows 7 64-bit (which runs fine) every now
and then for Windows-specific software (VMware management tools, etc).
I too wanted to put Linux on a laptop (I have plenty of Linux
servers). I tried for years, and it never worked well - power
management was not good, wifi support was lousy, display drivers were
unreliable.
Of course all that said, you probably could do very well on the modern
desktop-focused Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) on a laptop
today. Trying Red Hat Workstation in 2004 was a lousy experience!
I have used Chrome, but I have standardized on Mozilla Firefox with
the Adblock Plus and No-Script plugins. No-Script will protect you
from a great deal of ills, though you'll need to interact with it a
bit more to allow sites to run Javascript, so it is not for those who
lack a little patience. I have seen no downsides to Adblock Plus.
With regards to John's trouble, you can probably spend the time
cleaning, but that will be hours you won't get back. You could try to
use a tool like "Keyfinder" to extract the keys for the apps you have
on the system (like MS Office) and copy off your data - then nuke the
site from orbit. Make sure you wipe out the boot sector, in case
something has lodged itself there (which is very common). You could
always just pull the hard drive out and drop in a new one, and install
onto that. Put your old drive into an external USB enclosure and you
will have a nice portable (ob shop content) drive you can take to your
shop!
-Peter
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Scott <scott.hall.personal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand cue the Wars of the OS/Platform.
>
> (I want to put Linux on a box. No idea where to start. Macs seem like
> they're for the feeble-minded and fanbois. There, that ought to get things
> started nicely. :-) )
>
>
> On 3/8/2012 9:35 AM, Ronnie Day wrote:
>>
>> If you haven't bought your new box you might want to consider a Mac.
>
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