Powerbook Cost Justified? Options

[darcyb62]

It has finally come time for me to upgrade my hardware. I have been currently been using an old PIII 500mHz with 512Meg of ram and a slow hard disk. I use Tracktion for my host and with a lot track freezing, it becomes somewhat usabe (but just barely)...

Up until recently I had been considering staying on the Windows side, but with the recent introduction of the Mac Mini I decided to take a more serious look at what Apple could offer, so I've tried to do a bit of comparison. I'm committed to purchasing a notebook and I tried to target $2500 (Cdn) for cost.

This is what I have come up with...

On the Apple side:

Powerbook G4 combo drive
15.2-inch TFT Display
1280x854 resolution
1.5GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
ATI Mobility Radeon
9700 (64 MB DDR)
Backlit keyboard
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire 400 & 800
Analog audio in/out
DVI & S-Video out

Cost is $2499 (cdn)

On the PC side:
Dell Inspiron 9200
Intel® Pentium® M 755 Processor (2GHz/400MHz FSB)
17" ultrawide xga+
1 gig sdr ram
128MB ATI's™ Mobility Radeon™ 9700
24X CD-RW/DVD Combination Drive
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive

I might be wrong on this, but it seems to me that from a performance perspective, Dell would be the better option. In addition, there seems to be a greater number of low cost / free plugins for thw Windows side verses the Mac side (but I might be totally wron with respect to this as my experiience to date has been solely limited to the PC side).

I am really trying to justify the move to Mac but its been a difficult journey. Hopefully this forum can help provide me with some added insight.

Thanks.

[Narayan]

Hi, I have been using PC and a music composer who has been using Cakewalk all my life, that is, almost 15 years. In fact from Cakewalk 2 now till cakepro audio 9 I never needed to use any other software. Especially with the EMU's sound font technology, ably supported by Creative sound cards, I have been very comfortable creating professional music compostions incorporating a lot of ethnic sounds from all over the world. Right now, I am using a Fujitsu 1.8 GH notebook with creative USB sound card and 512 MB Ram (the maximum possible). Earlier (till Windows 98 SE) it was very nice. But with XP, lots of problems have cropped up. For one, the upgrades that keep coming are just frustrating, as your OS size keeps on increasing and thereby eating up your resources and slowing down the computer. Further, one gets very frustrated with the viruses, adware, spyware etc. and when the system crashes, you do not even know what caused it.

Now I am seriously considering buying am IMac G5 with at least one GIG RAM. With the added music software, it is coming to $4000 plus which is really stiff on a person like me, who is a freelancer. Further, I am not sure whether one needs some kind of special audio card to support the music software.

I would be thankful if one of you, who is a serious music composer enlighten me and suggest whether it is worth the switch and the money.
Thanks, Narayanan