Re: Ubuntu alternative for RPG programmer

On Jan 29, 2010, at 2:00 PM, linuxdesktop4i-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Of the people that have Macs that use them for development, will I be
kicking myself for getting a 5400RPM HD? The only reason I ask is because I
can get a $400 break by buying a refurb from Apple (
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_pro), which
will essentially pay for my AppleCare, but they only have refurbs with
5400RPM HDs.

Also, I do plan on getting 8GB of memory but I see they charge $600 to go
from 4GB to 8GB (ouch mama). I am assuming I could upgrade after the fact
for much less?

Personally I haven't had a problem with it. My only regret is that I have a relatively small hard drive and for reasons that I don't fully understand OS X is much happier with a bunch of spare drive space = and I don't have any.

Any sped difference is more than made up for by the brilliant file indexing system - being able to find any file by name/content/ characteristics in literally seconds means my hard drive is not constantly hammered by searches caused by this ancient brain forgetting where it put things. I use Mac mail for similar reasons - I never lose email any more - oh happy day!

As far as memory is concerned - I purchased Corsair to take mine up the max (which is 4Gb for me) and have had no problems with it. If I recall correctly it was about half the price.

My only other regrets (although they seemed a good idea at the time) were a) Buying Office for Mac. I had had compatibility issues with OO and thought this would solve them - it did solve some - but it gave me a whole bunch more and is flakey as hell. Current version is supposed to be better. And b) I switched from Parallels to VM Ware because VM Ware seemed faster and the Parallels upgrade offered very little for the money (it was more $ than VM Ware). Should have been more patient - Parallels appears to have caught up and significantly overhauled VM Ware in speed and sharing files between the two OS is _much_ harder in VM Ware because the C drive storage is not visible to OS X. When I get some disk space back I'll switch back to Parallels.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com