Living in Taiwan finally pays off... :)

[ben]

In the whole time I've lived out here, I've never really had much luck with saving money on computer parts.

You'd think that as most of the stuff is made here, it would be cheaper - but alas no - the UK is usually cheaper for Taiwanese made stuff!! (something to do with it being produced in tax free "for export only" zones).

However, today, I finally made a saving..

Just bought an 11" MacBook Air 4gb 128gb SSD with the i7 1.8ghz upgrade for only £840!!

I went to the computer show looking to get the Asus zenbook, or possibly the IBM (whoever bought them out) ultrabook - but after trying the keyboards on them, I really wasn't impressed.

On a whim I went over to the apple stand to have a look and tried the Air - OMG it's amazing, I can type full speed and the backlit keyboard is great - then the kicker, it's cheaper than the Asus... how is that possible?!?!

So yeah - I'm now writing this on a Mac, although I'm going to get W7 on it as soon as my new key arrives... probably keep it as dual boot though - Lion for my work, and W7 for my DJ system

It also means when I go on trips, I'll still be able to work on the forum (in theory) as I'm not restricted by the Eeepc's tiny keys anymore - hurrah!

 

[ChrisUK]

Awesome, not a fan of apple products but you have saved some money there.

Can't help but think what spec XPS or even alienware you could get for that wonga.

 

[jip0]

*awaits the mac vs pc war*

but still an awesome price for what you got, cant go wrong really if you dual boot it

i keep meaning to dual boot mine tbh when i need to use windows 7 i fire up the desktop, usually only need it for visual studio and when i get enough time to play some games

 

[ben]

Awesome, not a fan of apple products but you have saved some money there.

Can't help but think what spec XPS or even alienware you could get for that wonga.

Had to be 11" though or it wouldn't fit in my bag

 

[ben]

Had to be 11" though or it wouldn't fit in my bag

Talking of dual boot, how can I setup more than 1 partition?

I want a new small partition for my Windows install, then another partition that will hold all my music (and I'd also like this accessible in OSX if possible)

Is it a case of running the bootcamp wizard in OSX, choosing the total size - then when Windows setup runs, delete the bootcamp partition and create it again smaller?

(I want to end up with)
p1 - OSX (64gb)
p2 - W7 (15gb)
p3 - Data (usable from both OS if possible, if not, just W7 is fine) (49gb or whatever is left)

 

[colin79666]

Boot Camp asks you to make a partition for Windows and you can choose the size then.

Once you have Mac OS and Windows running then you can use disk utility within Mac OS to shrink the Mac partition and make a new partition - just be sure to format it as FAT32 if you want it to be fully compatible with both.

 

[arc]

The Zenbook UX31 is 13" though

I've wanted a Mac Book Air 13 since the new ones came out, hard to justify the cost though. The UX31 looks like a good alternative though, better spec, cheaper and a higher res screen than the MBA13. Reviews say the keyboard isn't as good as the MBA though.

 

[DlightSwitch]

Had to be 11" though or it wouldn't fit in my bag

That's what she said.

 

[Dragon Man]

XPS is no good, take it from me. i had one for 5 years (the dell XPS M1710) and every other month something would go wrong with it. mostly graphics related... it came with a broken wifi card.. so what does that tell you!

oh and just to add, at the time my "life savings" was used to buy it at a £1550. and it was base spec!

worse laptop i had ever used.
soon as the warranty ran out, it lived for another 2 weeks then the graphics card failed again. (after its 30th plus replacement)

 

[ben]

The Zenbook UX31 is 13" though

I've wanted a Mac Book Air 13 since the new ones came out, hard to justify the cost though. The UX31 looks like a good alternative though, better spec, cheaper and a higher res screen than the MBA13. Reviews say the keyboard isn't as good as the MBA though.

The keyboard on the UX31 is awful - in my typing test I made so many mistakes, mainly due to keypresses not registering.

The Air keyboard is a full size one and feels really comfortable to type on.

Ah yes about the size - I guess I was willing to make a compromise on that, but then, that was before I saw the Air...

@Colin - Ok that makes sense - but no way to get OSX to read NTFS?

Actually, from posting on the Traktor forum, they are telling me not to bother with a dual boot and just run Traktor from the OSX partition. However, if I want to fully optimize it, I will need to turn off all the power saving, force turbo etc - and I won't want this for my normal day to day work.

If I was to create a second user - could I have that one setup using a different power / background process profile? Or will they always follow the "Master"

(In Windows I would disable all the system services, remove un-needed hardware profiles etc etc)

 

[colin79666]

Microsoft hasn't been open about NTFS so the nix OSes write ability is not 100% reliable/safe. You can enable it with some terminal commands in Mac OS but I'd imagine Apple didn't for a reason. Best to stick with Fat32 for a common data partition.

 

[ben]

Just been trying out Traktor running on OSX and it does run really well, so I think for now I won't bother with the dual boot

One seriously annoying thing though, Microsoft Live Mesh takes AGGGGGEEESSS to sync files from the MAC > PC