new dualboot Mac or windows laptop for web work

M

mgm_03

Registered
I am a web develop and often work away from home where I have a windows desktop. It's pretty much futile to do web work without a Windows computer.

Has anyone bought the new MacBook Pro for the sake of having one computer and is it effective for doing web development ...CSS in particular.

I'm tempted to buy a refurbished sub $500 latop because all I would use it for is web browsing. Of course, there may be an unexpected instance where I need some other feature/capability.
 
mgm_03 said:
Has anyone bought the new MacBook Pro for the sake of having one computer and is it effective for doing web development ...CSS in particular.
Click to expand...

A significant portion of the sales of Intel-based Macs is to people who want one machine to be able to test websites on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

I'm tempted to buy a refurbished sub $500 latop because all I would use it for is web browsing. Of course, there may be an unexpected instance where I need some other feature/capability.
Click to expand...

The Intel transition is fairly recent, and only Macs equipped with Intel processors are able to boot into Windows. You might be able to pick up a refurbished model at that price though. Earlier Power-PC (ie G3, G4 or G5) driven Macs can't boot into Windows, although they can run Virtual PC which many people find more than adequete for the sort of web-design and testing you plan to do.
 
Though, getting an older laptop might not be so economic, if you add it up. Virtual PC can be expensive, and it's slow. A PowerPC laptop will be slow, in compairisn. The battery may need replacing if it's old, another $129. The old Core Duo MacBook sells refurbished for $899 - not cheap, but not expensive considering what it does. That's 1.83 GHz of Core Duo processor goodness, which will blow away any G4 using Universal apps (though a G4 would win with un-ported apps like Office, Photoshop, etc). The MacBook Pro can do much, much more than web browsing, but if you bought one, you'd be able to use the extra screen size and coolness factor. You could probably pick up an old PowerBook 17" if you really wanted to max out on pixel space, but the G4 processor is nothing compared to the MacBook's Core 2 Duo. Another option would be the old MacBook Pro, with a Core Duo processor, no FW800, 2 GB RAM limit. It's not as feature packed as the new MacBook Pro, but it starts at $1399 refurbished, $700 (!) cheaper than the new version..
 
Hi,

I am a web developer and IT consultant on a mainframe system. I have bought a new 2ghz Macbook (not Pro) wiht 1gb ram and 100gig hd.

I have installed bootcamp and windows XP home for the mainframe terminal emulation software I must use, and I have loaded Macromedia Studio 8 into Mac OSX for web development.

The Mac takes a bit of getting used to, but I think it is a very worthwhile exercise for any IT professional not matter your specific discipline.

The Macbook is a superb piece of engineering and I have no regrets (except that I upgraded my desktop only 6 months ago and I really would like an iMac now.

i would say that Dreamweaver manifests fairly differently on the Mac anf you may have a slight learning curve on some of your software also.

so in summary, stump up for a new macbook (about £1300) by the time you upgrade as I did, plus a copy of windows etc.

The boot time between OSX and windows XP is about third the time my old Sony Vaio T1XP took to start up.
 
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