The budgetary gods and my patron saint of linguini were in happy confluence in the month of May, and thus favored me with a brand spanking new laptop. Haven't used it enough to comment on performance, but am happy to barter my old, well-loved, yet battered Titanium G4 laptop, running at 400 MgHz for this 17 inch screen beauty, running at 2.16 GHz.
Lessee, old hard drive 10 gig, new hard drive 120 gig. Advantage: new!
Old chip speed: 400 MgHz, new chip speed 2.16 GHz. Advantage: new!
Old RAM quantity: 384 Megs, new RAM quantity: 2 Gigs. Advantage: new!
blah blah blah, you get the point. Yayyyyy for new.
I even plan on installing Windows XP (shudder) aka BootCamp, so we can run our GIS software on the road, and for clients/prospects. I wonder - does this mean I have to worry about virus protection and spyware and all that crap now? Bleh. Oh well, won't be running much in all probability.
Old laptop being drained of data, to fill the new laptop. Painless process that took about 15 minutes from start to finish. Much easier than re-entering/installing all my old settings/software.
Old laptop (aka Planxty) has served well. Soon to be bartered to a friend for goods and services, or whatever I can get.
I recommend Parallels Workstation rather than BootCamp. I ended up deleting the boot camp partition after a few hours because I didn't like having to reboot into Windows. I now have XP in a separate window running Outlook & MS Access while I'm using OS X here.
Thanks for the tip, Mike. Will have to see which works better for me.