Having just spent an hour trying to help a friend figure out how to get her new top-line Thinkpad to play nicely with wireless, and gain control over the TSR crap that loads up on boot...

Do not bother with the Dell.

The Thinkpad was nice enough, but if I'd happened to have a hammer on me, it'd have been all little jingly pieces of shrapnel by the time I was done dealing with it.

Amberglow, what would you use the laptop for? If it is just reading Metachat in the coffee shop, how about a used Mac laptop off Ebay or Craigslist?

The MacBook Pro doesn't seem any likely to boot Windows as the dual-core iMac.
I recently got ahold of an off-lease ThinkPad and am (mostly) happy with it.
Regardless of your choice, you should be prepared to spend extra for a 7200 RPM hard drive. 5400 revs are barely-tolerable for a portable; 4200 is nightmarishly slow, particularly if you're defragmenting files in Windows.

For communicating with the Mac, consider VNC, drive mapping, or Apple's Bonjour and Rendezvous. Both Panther and Tiger are decent with communicating to PCs - Puma (10.1.x) was the build that was heavily dependent on additional software like (Thursby's) DAVe.

i don't trust ebay, but have never tried craigslist--can i get a mac laptop for 500 or less?

is this a good price, you think? 529 for an ibook g3/800 ?

I wouldn't trust Craigslist either. Granted, the Novelette incident didn't occur there, though that's what you could get stuck with.

On Preview: TechRestore's asking price for the snow iBook is decent; be sure to check caveats regarding that model's battery life before purchasing.

I don't know about mixing Mac and PC. Isn't this sort of miscegenation against the law in some states? Check your local laws.

Macs may do Windoze, but Windoze doesn't do Macs.

Except in VirtualPC. Which...


...


runs...



...excruciatingly slow through its emulation.

done! thanks! : >

I've got MacOSX 10.4 for Intel running on my Thinkpad. It's not the version shipped with the MacBooks, but a very slightly earlier development seed. It works pretty well, all things considered.

http://www.osx86project.com

I'd expect the hardware dependencies (EFI, TPM, other junk) in the shipping 10.4 to be worked around any day now, BTW.

Depending on how you do file sharing, it might not be terrible. I have a PC around, and it plays well with my Mac life, excepting a few Mac-only bits of software that I've grown reliant on (OmniOutliner, etc).

(fwiw, I've grown so used to OS X, and my mac setup, that the productivity decrease I take from working on a cheap wintel makes it a terrible idea for me.)

well, i ordered that one, so we'll see.

i guess i need to get airport now too? or can i get another wireless card?