I was earlier wondering which notebook to buy in my "Notebook for fun" thread. I came into a conclusion that, right now, there isn't a really suitable notebook for me in the market. I was looking for a notebook with which I could play games, surf the net, write documents, make music (rookie music, nothing hard-core) and maybe play some dvd movies (though I have a home-theatre). The best bets for me were IBM and HP/Compaq. But with IBM I wouldn't get a widescreen display (which I really need) and with HP/Compaq, their NX7010 model has a lame graphics card (Radeon 9200). By the way, my preferences are that I need Ati graphics card and a widescreen display (15.4" ).

Now, I have read about Apple's Macintosh Powerbook series. Mac has revieved mixed reviews. Since I never have used a Mac, I can't tell whether it's better or worse when compared to PC.

Here's something I do know:

- people who make music really prefer using a Mac rather than a PC
- Macs don't support as many computer programs as PC. Could I run Half Life 2, Norton Internet Security 2005 or Adobe Photo Elements 3.0 on a Mac?
- The one disadvantage is that I would have to learn the Macs Panther OS since I always have used Windows (although some people have said that Macs OS is a lot simpler to use than Windows).

My question to you is: Should I consider Mac as an option when I need a notebook for games, documents, netsurfing, making music (rookie level), watching movies or even storaging pics from my digicam?

My budget is somewhere between 1800-2500 euros (bare in mind that I live in Finland, which is a very expensive country).

For what you want to do you absolutely do NOT want an apple notebook. First, there are basically no games written for the mac platform. You could count all the games for apple in existance and not run out of fingers, none of which are worth playing. They couldn't run any games anyway due to the extremely low end graphics cards in them.
Mac used to be the prefered plateform for music/video editing only because the software for music/video editing was only avaliable for Mac. Now that the software is avaliable for PC they have become the prefered platform. Now people only buy macs because they have always bought them and are nostalgic for them.

If you have never used an apple before I suggest you not start now. Everyone says "oh they are so easy to use" but that is definatly NOT true. If you do not have a fairly decent ammount of experience with them they are very hard to use. I had to do tech support for every sort of mac you can think of when I worked for a school district. They are a techs worst nightmare. I've had to deal with everything from the apple IIe to the new G5 towers and all the notebooks inbetween there as well. They are seriously all overpriced garbage. Especially when networked, the appletalk protocol they use creates so much network spam it slows network traffic to a crawl.

Well... Hopefully I have turned you away from the dark side

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>