New Laptop Selection

Graueradler

Graueradler

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Graueradler
I'm going to be buying a replacement laptop. Use is not demanding - email, light spreadsheet and word processing, web use - like this website but no gaming.

Staples has 4 on sale this week:

Toshiba 15.6" w/Intel Pentium B940, 4GB RAM, 640GB Hard Drive $400

acer 15.6" w/AMD E-350, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD $380

acer 15.6" w/Intel Core 13-231 OM, 4GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

acer 17.3" w/Intel Pentium B940, 4 GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

Price between these 4 not a factor.

Which would you recommend?
 
The 13" Macbook Pro. You will never look back, and wonder why you wasted so much time and energy with Microsoft.

It is like climbing through a thick cloud layer and suddenly bursting into the clear air and sunshine! BTDT
 
If price is not a factor, just take a look at them and see which one feels the best. Performance is going to be comparable on all of them.
 
Graueradler said:
I'm going to be buying a replacement laptop. Use is not demanding - email, light spreadsheet and word processing, web use - like this website but no gaming.

Staples has 4 on sale this week:

Toshiba 15.6" w/Intel Pentium B940, 4GB RAM, 640GB Hard Drive $400

acer 15.6" w/AMD E-350, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD $380

acer 15.6" w/Intel Core 13-231 OM, 4GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

acer 17.3" w/Intel Pentium B940, 4 GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

Price between these 4 not a factor.

Which would you recommend?
Click to expand...
None of those are an Apple.
 
AMEN! We are forced to have one piece-of-crap PC in the house for proprietary work software. :mad2: Other than that.....we are a Mac family. No more headaches.:goofy:

kgruber said:
The 13" Macbook Pro. You will never look back, and wonder why you wasted so much time and energy with Microsoft.

It is like climbing through a thick cloud layer and suddenly bursting into the clear air and sunshine! BTDT
Click to expand...
 
Spend some time typing on the various keyboards of the PCs you are looking at.
The internals are comparable, the thing that you use all the time is the keyboard. Make sure it works for you and get the one that feels the best.
At the same time, use the trackpads on all of them. A great PC with a screwy keyboard or bad trackpad will drive you nuts.
Also, get a ram upgrade at time of purchase.

Also, we switched to Macs about 18 months ago. No regrets. I would seriously consider making the jump. The new MacBook Air and the 13" Macbook should be on your try list.
 
If I buy a mac laptop, will it interact with all the peripherals and other computers, run all the software which my pc laptop currently does.....without a lot of tech time getting everyone to play nice?

-5 different printers various makes
-wifi to internet
-wifi to another pc
-transfer Word, Excel, Quickbooks documents between mac and pc via flash drive
-run all the same programs I now use
?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
If I buy a mac laptop, will it interact with all the peripherals and other computers, run all the software which my pc laptop currently does.....without a lot of tech time getting everyone to play nice?

-5 different printers various makes
-wifi to internet
-wifi to another pc
-transfer Word, Excel, Quickbooks documents between mac and pc via flash drive
-run all the same programs I now use
?
Click to expand...

Well, I'll tell you my experience.
MS Office stuff works seamlessly. I now use MS Office for Mac.
Quickbook is available for Macs.
Do you have anything else that is PC only?

The printers are a snap. I have a networked color laserjet MFP, and every time there was a new PC it took hours of installing software, troubleshooting, dealing with IP addresses, and other stuff to get everything to work right.
With the Mac, I downloaded the software, installed it, and it recognized the printer, and set up all the printer, scanner, and scan to PDF functions in about 10 seconds.

My wife wanted a MacBook, so I got her one. When I set it up, setting up all the networks, network drives, and printers (LaserMFP, color inkjet, and mono laser) took less time than just getting the LaserMFP to work on a Windows box.
It was so much simpler, I went out three days later an bought myself a MacBook.

I has the same concerns (but what about my software, etc etc). Yes, A had to buy Office again, but I am no longer doing the "tech support" thing for my wife's machine. And I am no longer dealing with fighting Windows to get things done.

So, think about it.
My PC upstairs is due for replacement. I'm replacing it with a Mac Mini which will be a Time Machine backup server for both the MacBooks, and a file server for our IPads.
 
The only stuff I run on windows is MS Access, Golden Eagle, Jeppesen Services and Visio. Although I rarely use Vision and instead use Omnigraffle on the Mac. But a few things still show up on my desk in Visio. While Omnigraffle can open them and save in that format it is not always perfect and seamless.

My company recently added Lync as our phone system. But Mac Office 2011 Communicator does almost everything that Lync can do. So I use it and have not missed the few extras from my PC.
 
I bought this one:

acer 15.6" w/Intel Core 13-231 OM, 4GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

I did get a Mac hood ornament for it so maybe I won't be excommunicated!!!
 
Graueradler said:
I bought this one:

acer 15.6" w/Intel Core 13-231 OM, 4GB RAM, 640GB HD $450

I did get a Mac hood ornament for it so maybe I won't be excommunicated!!!
Click to expand...

That'll work.

Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, just in a different way. I personally think they're approching anti-trust territory with some of their actions related to iOS and the app store & how they've got the OS locked down - it remains to be seen how they'll use the patent trove that the consortium bought from Nortel.
 
wsuffa said:
Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, just in a different way. I personally think they're approching anti-trust territory with some of their actions related to iOS and the app store & how they've got the OS locked down - it remains to be seen how they'll use the patent trove that the consortium bought from Nortel.
Click to expand...
Plus, Apple are on the board of so-called "REACT", who busted the door of Jason Chen. In my day only the mob bought pocket cops. They definitely are not going to limit themselves to beating up on defenceless in the courtrooms only.
 
PilotAlan said:
Quickbook is available for Macs.
Click to expand...

Careful with Intuit, they've been awful supporting Mac over the years.

Currently the only real version of Quicken (not QuickBooks) that has ANY features at all is Quicken 2007 for Mac. Their "replacement" that's not a PowerPC/Rosetta application called "Quicken Essentials" is a total POS.

And with OSX Lion now out and Rosetta support officially terminated by Apple, you can't upgrade to Lion and keep Quicken for Mac 2007. It will not run anymore.

They've neglected this and/or thrown half-solutions at it since 2007, obviously. Intuit SUCKS on Apple.

I'm in the process of painfully moving everything over to MoneyDance after 10+ years of Quicken and paying Intuit for upgrades "faithfully" on all platforms. Time to dump them. Other options include iBank and some others, but MoneyDance seems to have the best chance of handling online banking, per numerous reviews.

So far, I must admit, it's handling imports of QIF files very poorly. I may be "starting over"... sigh.
 
denverpilot said:
I'm in the process of painfully moving everything over to MoneyDance after 10+ years of Quicken and paying Intuit for upgrades "faithfully" on all platforms. Time to dump them. Other options include iBank and some others, but MoneyDance seems to have the best chance of handling online banking, per numerous reviews.

So far, I must admit, it's handling imports of QIF files very poorly. I may be "starting over"... sigh.
Click to expand...
Did you follow these directions?

http://help.infinitekind.com/kb/imp...transfer-my-data-from-quicken-into-moneydance

The only problem I have had with the import so far is that all the accounts I had hidden in Quicken show up in Moneydance so I'm in the process of making them "inactive" which hides them again. I didn't realize I had so many different accounts over the past 15 years. Maybe I will find some other snags but for now it's been going OK.
 
Yeah, that's been one of the problems. And luckily I did find (and follow) that document. Just for fun I wiped the thing and started over and tried it NOT following those instructions (for fun... software testing geek, ya know) doing it the "intuitive" way I would think someone would try, and I give MoneyDance an "F" on that one. REALLY wacked then.

I hear that iBank handles QIF files a whole lot better, but it looked a bit "Fisher Price" to me... way too many primary colors for a finance application. ;)
 
Which Quicken program are you importing from.? Mine is Quicken 2010 for Windows. I never tried the Mac versions of Quicken as I have only had Macs for a few months. I could stick with Quicken because I have Windows 7 installed but I decided to experiment. I will run both programs for awhile.
 
Quicken 2006 for Mac. We converted (which was also hideous) from the Windows version during Christmas break of 2006-2007.

I'm probably going to just start over with MoneyDance and learn to use it right. The Quicken import seems to set things up in odd ways that don't match the methodology.

It'll mean a little more work at tax time this next year, but not a lot since I've curtailed "crazy busy trading" in stocks and what-not while acclimatizing to the new job and new schedule.

But I'll have a better, more customized, cleaner, resulting setup I think. It may also trigger me finally hunting for a bank that does online stuff better than my Credit Union.

They're truly awful as far as online access goes, including bouncing you out to 3rd party sites for much of their web "experience", but make up for it in so many other ways that I've overlooked it for over a decade.

Would prefer to have a bit more automation in the whole process if I can get it all working, though.

Heck, while I'm at it, maybe it's time to move the mortgage away from the god-awful evil bank that bought it during the bail-outs. I really hate seeing those schmucks making money off of me.

The flip side: I don't have time for this crap right now. ;) And I'm sure the CU knows that. Competition in banking is a joke and trying to figure out the various fee schedules and silliness requires a pretty large spreadsheet just to figure out how exactly each one intends to screw you over to get the one that fits your setup the best.

CUs will spoil you. Looking at a few banks I see charges for things I've done for over a decade for free, and wonder why anyone would put up with that. ;)
 
I spent all day yesterday getting Moneydance set up and so far it seems OK. The most hassle I had was setting up the downloads from financial institutions. There's one fund family where I have an IRA which will not download into Moneydance although it does into Quicken. Also, the initial downloads from all institutions produced many duplicate transactions which I had to delete. The other time consuming job was hiding all the accounts and securities which I had in the past but are now closed or sold. You need to go through and mark them "inactive". It's not good to delete them because you lose the balancing transaction too and Moneydance uses double entry accounting. I'm going to play with this for a little while but I think it will eventually work as well as Quicken. I was dubious about changing financial programs because I have 15-20 years worth of transactions in many different accounts and institutions (more than I remembered) but it seems like the transition went as well as could be expected. In my case I wouldn't even dream of starting over.
 
Ha. We badly hijacked this thread. Sorry.

I haven't had an "all day" to mess with it yet but I was also disappointed in that duplication problem.

Seems like MoneyDance has no anti-dupe engine under the hood and Quicken does.

You know you're trying too hard to work around software limitations when you start thinking... "Maybe it's time to switch banks.". Haha.

All in all, it's cross-platform, actively developed, and they seem as responsive to customer comments as any small software outfit, so I'll probably fight with it until it works right for us.

Quicken can go straight to... the trash folder. ;)
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
If I buy a mac laptop, will it interact with all the peripherals and other computers, run all the software which my pc laptop currently does.....without a lot of tech time getting everyone to play nice?

-5 different printers various makes
-wifi to internet
-wifi to another pc
-transfer Word, Excel, Quickbooks documents between mac and pc via flash drive
-run all the same programs I now use
?
Click to expand...

Dave,

Tread carefully.

* What other software do you use besides what you specifically listed? You can buy MS Office, QuickBooks, and many other software packages for Mac OS. Macs include a fair amount of software as well (and not just demo versions). But, you can't just copy your Windows software onto a Mac and run it. If there's any software that doesn't directly run on the Mac OS, you can use VirtualBox (free) and install a copy of Windows (not free) on the Mac to use just for the software that still requires Windows. That also separates said software from the rest of the machine and reduces worries about malware, especially if you avoid connecting to the web on the Windows side (use a browser and email program on the Mac side instead).
* Printing works very well, without the driver headaches sometimes present on Windows.
* Yes, it'll do WiFi to the Internet quite nicely.
* What do you mean by "WiFi to another PC?" Sure it'll do that, but making a network connection isn't the important part - What you do with that connection is. If it's simply file transfers, yes it'll do that.
* Careful with QuickBooks - Intuit is a real pain in the butt to work with, they're constantly "upgrading" things, and throwing out their own "standards" to try to force you to re-buy their software every year. I don't know if the files are directly compatible back and forth between the current Mac and PC versions - You may have to "export" on one and "import" on the other.

I believe you're running several PC's. If you're comfortable with them, keep them. If they drive you nuts, and you like your iPads and iPhone, you may want to give the Mac a try - Once you're up and running I think you'd like it, but realize that the switch won't be without a few headaches or a learning curve.
 
Pa28-140 said:
AMEN! We are forced to have one piece-of-crap PC in the house for proprietary work software. :mad2: Other than that.....we are a Mac family. No more headaches.:goofy:
Click to expand...

I use VirtualBox and run Windows 7 on my Mac for the proprietary work software. It's nicely sandboxed so that all of the Windows crapware that causes problems for an actual Windows machine, doesn't cause me any problems. (Yet, anyway.)
 
flyingcheesehead said:
I use VirtualBox and run Windows 7 on my Mac for the proprietary work software. It's nicely sandboxed so that all of the Windows crapware that causes problems for an actual Windows machine, doesn't cause me any problems. (Yet, anyway.)
Click to expand...

Yep. I have one thing that absolutely requires IE6 or higher. Nothing on the Mac can fool it. I have parallels and a copy of Win7 for that one thing.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
I use VirtualBox and run Windows 7 on my Mac for the proprietary work software. It's nicely sandboxed so that all of the Windows crapware that causes problems for an actual Windows machine, doesn't cause me any problems. (Yet, anyway.)
Click to expand...

Yep. I have one thing that absolutely requires IE6 or higher. Nothing on the Mac can fool it.
Also, from time to time I absolutely must have Visio, and there's no Mac version.
I have parallels and a copy of Win7 for those two things.
 
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