Hello, I have used PC all my life and now I am in the market for a notebook. Obviously Mac has proven to be much better these days then its PC competitors. I have a few question so I hope they can be answered by this community.

1) I am thinking of purchasing the $1249 notebook with 2.0 ghz and 1 gig of ram, however I may need to use windows as well. So my first question is: Should I get 1 gig or 2 gigs of RAM if I choose to utilize the Boot Camp option?

2) I am a business student in university and this notebook is mostly for educational purposes. Now my textbooks come with PC oriented Cd-Roms, such as Business Plan Pro. My second question is: Will these Cd roms runs perfectly while using the windows OS on a mac book. *Added note* most of my textbooks in the future will be from pearson education company and almost all will have cd-roms as aids or programs for the courses I am enrolled in.

3) My notebook purchase will not be for gaming whatsoever, but only for music,movies and TV shows. My third question is: IF i purchase this macbook wil it play Xvid compressed files and Matroska files smoothly?

Since this is my first post I really dont know anybody here. That being said for those that reply I apprecaite you taking the time to read my questions and your incite on all three matters is very much appreciated :D

Cheers!

BMWMac3

If you only need it for the average consumer needs than 1 gb is perfectly fine. Bootcamp works perfectly fine with all windows apps. minus some enormously demanding games and graphics programmes. I have a macbook and you honestly cannot find a comparable computer for this price...you will pick up wireless signals that high end pc's wont even recognize and the core2duo processing is fantastic. I have the 2.0, c2d 1gb macbook and i have parallels on it, which is not as good as bootcamp and I can use all kinds of windows apps. So you should be fine!


oh and just get VLC player....it plays everything. Or you can get quicktime plug ins for almost any file format.


Cheers!

Welcome to ehmac!

1.Get the 1GB of RAM and upgrade it later yourself if you feel you need it. You will save yourself a couple of hundred dollars. I have absolutely no experience with computer hardware upgrades, but I bought my extra RAM for my MacBook online, and installed it in less than 5 minutes. Apple has directions on their website.

2. As long as you are running windows, you should have no issues whatsoever running a CD. From what I have read around here, most people recommend Parallels as a method of running a windows OS, as opposed to Boot Camp. I run nither, so perhaps some other will chime in and give you some more hints there.

3. I use VLC media player (did on my old PC as well) and it plays every format i have ever encountered. I use my MacBook for the same things - music, movies, school etc and have yet to run into a situation in which I couldn't accomplish a task I was able to on my pc notebooks and desktops.

Let us know how your purchase goes! Good luck!