At 01:53 PM 3/5/06 -0800, Eric Dannewitz wrote: >But, honestly, what >piece of software are you going to use that you can't get for a Mac?
Except for Finale, the most frequent musical apps that I use don't come in Mac versions... Sonar Audition AudioMulch Synthedit As far as laptops go, I bought a Dell laptop with WinXP Pro in October, with as many features as I could squeeze into a $1,200+ deal at Costco. The low-end 15.4" display does not have as wide an angle of visibility as a typical Apple laptop. That's the weak point for someone sharing a machine to watch videos or do demos, but not an issue for me. It took a lot of configuring to get rid of the dreck in WinXP that slows it down and uses screen real estate. I've gotten rid of all the dopey animations, fading, coloring, etc., so it's a nice dead-looking box now. Just the way I like it. (Unfortunately, Finale 2005 doesn't seem to respect the Windows ClearType font-smoothing, so the Finale screen display is jagged.) Its internal soundcard is perfectly adequate for everyday work, but I use an external M-Audio box for concert recording. The Intel wireless is excellent, and grabs a usable signal easily. Recently in Europe, my Mac-carrying co-composer was frustrated by my functioning PC when he couldn't check his email. The keyboard is miserable, but that's the case with every laptop, and I dislike touch pads. I bought an add-on trackball for working at a desk. It has the usual pile of features (CD/DVD burner, bunch-o-ports and slots and video outputs) and lots of useless built-in software that I quickly ditched. The processor is not fast (Pentium 1.5GHz), which was the biggest compromise in getting a laptop at a price I could afford. It's just a tad faster than the 1.4GHz AMD desktop that I had built four years earlier, and the extra heavy lifting required by WinXP coupled with the poorer math on the Pentium makes it run about even with my desktop when processing sound or video files. The battery life is very good. At full bore, running wireless and recording sound files, it gets about 4.5 hours on a full charge. Speaking of PC vs. Mac, there was a very funny slap at Microsoft a few days ago -- an animation about "if Microsoft marketed the iPod". A healthy chuckle. (Unfortunately, the video was removed for reasons not explained on the youtube.com site.) Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/365-2007.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
