Re: [tlug] Advice on buying a Macbook

[mcooper <mcooper@example.com>]

One-third of the clients I administer are Macs, and the difference  
between Mactel and PPC (Piss-Poor Chip) could not be greater.

One of the reasons that I have not been messing with desktop Linux  
much these days is that I can't pull myself away from the Mactel in  
my office. I am neglecting Windows, too, which is still running  
because it has Ghost and an IDE that I need. Other than that, the  
Mactel rules... hands down.

I  bought our Macbooks through Apple online store Educational  
discount, and the resulting prices were almost as cheap as Dell. I  
would highly recommend that you get the extended warranty, though.  
The default warranty is one year. The extension covers up to three  
years. Or buy it from a merchant that offers a five-year warranty,  
but do read the fine print. I once got a five-year extension from  
Best Denki, only to read the fine print (constipated and no other  
reading material) to find that the "five years" really means 100% of  
all repair costs in the first year (which is covered by the  
manufacturer, anyway), then 80% in the second year, 60% in the third,  
and so on. Do the math, and it is a rip-off. They wouldn't offer  
those warranties if they didn't make money off of them.

As a side note, our Admissions department just bought a Mactel iMac  
with 2GB of memory, so I installed Parallels virtualization software  
trial version on it. I then installed WindowsXP and Ubuntu, and I  
must be honest... they ran faster than on the new Dell Optiplex  
clients. It was WONDERFUL. You must try it out. Parallels is very  
easy to understand, elegant, and straightforward.

I would love to be able to do virtualization as easily on the RHEL  
servers.

Micheal