I second what Betty said, with the addition that if you did get a
mac, then the Boot Camp partition can be used to run windows
both natively and in a virtual machine, and Apple's drivers lets
you keep much of the functionality of the extremely cool multi-touch
trackpad in Windows. I've been told that Crossover Mac and Wine
still do not work very well with Matlab so you'd want to run Window's
natively in a Boot Camp partition and/or in a virtual machine. The
latest comparisons I've seen still give the edge to Parallels over
all the virtualization choices.
Betty is also right that Mathematica is way better than Matlab, but
you are probably stuck with that. Generally, site licenses are only
concerned with the number of licenses for the software and don't
care about OS versions. Also, some licenses only care about the
number of concurrent uses of the software so you might also be
able to have multiple OS versions as well, if you wanted it and if
your employers were cooperative.
From: b_s-wilk <[email protected]>
Thus, my question: can a Mac run PC programs well enough to make a
Mac laptop a desirable choice, or is there no reason to prefer a Mac
laptop over a PC laptop?
Please note that I am not a PC or Mac partisan. I've never owned a
laptop nor a Mac, so I have no opinion at all about the differences
between the PC and the Mac until I have tried both at some length.
In your case, a quality PC might be a better choice, as long as it's
not
one of the cheap ones. The $600 laptop may look like a bargain, but I
wouldn't want to run Matlab [Mathematica is better] on anything less
than a computer that has the 'pro' version of Windows. Our HP notebook
that retails at $1000 is barely adequate--same age as my MacBook, $200
less, with much lower specs. I like Toshiba, Alien [for video], but am
stuck with HP, Compaq, Dell.
If you decide on a MacBook or Pro, [MacBook doesn't have PC card slot]
you can run Windows apps natively with Boot Camp, in emulation
[Parallels, VMWare], or without Windows using Crossover Mac or Wine.
Gives you more choices. There are plenty of very good free or
shareware
open source apps for Macs. Ask for a list when you need it.
The two things I notice immediately in Mac OS X are the display
quality
and mouse control. Running Windows on a Mac won't let you see that.
Wine
or Crossover Mac might.
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