Well, OK, I think it’s time I made a post on the blog. Amazingly enough, there’s a reason I don’t keep my own blog up to date and thats that I never have anything to say worth putting the effort in to actually write down or type in.
Anyway, I’ve been eyeing up a Mac Laptop for a long time and with the new iteration of Apple Powerbooks all with Superdrives and somewhat cheaper (especially with Academic pricing) they seem all the more attractive.
I’ve had a tab open in Firefox for the last 3 days with the 15″ Powerbook on it, drooling when I switch on my computer at the sight of it! Academic pricing on that baby is $3675 incl. GST which for the specs really isn’t bad at all.
With my 21st birthday coming up and Mum wanting to buy a laptop at some stage I’m hoping I can sort out some kind of swapsies deal, I give her my PC (which has a list of problems I might address later) and she buys me a Powerbook for my 21st Birthday present. It’s a very tall ask, very, very! But it could quite possibly be one of the most uber presents of ever, everness… ever.
Anyway, back to my PC laptop. It was bought at the start of 2003 at The PC Company before it went bust later that year. It is noisy, the fan spins continuously, the screen brightness controls have a limited range, it clocks back when it is on battery power; with no option to make it run at full speed, the battery is now dead; the lower battery warning switches on as soon as I unplug it from the wall and it doesn’t have native USB2.0 support.
On the plus side, it is a Pentium 4, 2.4GHz processor, has a 40GB harddrive and 512MB RAM and tons of (read: 4) USB ports (USB1.1 only sadly).
I think I’d feel slightly bad for giving my Mum what I think is such a piece of crap but in all honesty it looks like the perfect machine for her, she wants something low profile that is a computer basically, this thing isn’t slow my any stretch of the imagination and plays DVD’s, burns CD’s etc so I guess it’ll be OK, except, it is pretty much useless as a portable laptop with a battery in that condition.
Either way, I’ve had altogether enough of using Windows and feel it time to move up in the world to a platform where Developers respect the User Interface Guidelines a little more and generally a more stable base and implementation of an Operating System. The whole UNIX backend is a huge drawcard for me as well, there are so many things I get annoyed with doing on Windows, sometimes I just want to do it the *nix way, like compiling an Open Source C++ program or timing the runtime of a process without 3rd party (probably GUI based) software.