Help me buy a computer

[owl]

Suppose elerrina_amanya and I were buying a laptop or whatever they're called these days.

[Poll #1047204]


Apparently it is possible to get student discount on a Mac. I was going to say I needed more info on Macs, but I suppose a new Windows machine would have Vista, of which I have heard little and none good. When Microsoft came up with an OS that mostly works, why can't they just stick with it?

Comments

[owl]

I'm not bothered about the learning curve much, as I've used different OS before—I used Linux at uni—the professor went 'Sorry you've got to spend a week of your project time learning how to use it, here's the reference, but Windows is a resource-hog and we need to do squillions of calculations a second'—it took me about two days to get used to it actually—and my first school computer was a Mac, although that was a decade and *cough* change ago. Actually I lie, the very first was known as 'the BBC computer' and had a keyboard about 4 inches thick and floppies that were actually floppy and had a hole in the middle and wiped themselves if left to close to things with a magnetic field like, oh, monitors.

It would be the applications that would make me hesitate. I'd be pleased enough to ditch IE forever (I use Firefox all the time and I've never had real problems with any website), and I don't do games beyond a bit of Sudoku. However, it would be annoying to want some program and find that it only was for windows. Like Semagic for instance, sigh.

Don't worry, I wasn't planning on Linux. I like it, but I like even more having a sysadmin to yell to when things don't work the way they ought.