:p

The cool thing is that they are letting folks who buy a Mac between yesterday and the release of Snow Leopard upgrade their OS for $9.95.

Oh, I was being serious! :p

Is it worth it for me to upgrade to Snow Leopard? Is the current OS already outdated? I hear it's only $29 to upgrade for current customers.

My question now isn't the model or the size. I'm nearly certain that I'm going to get a 13" MB Pro, since I don't want plastic. I'm now debating the drive size...I know that Macs are much more resistant to :rolleyes: than Windows, but I still want to keep backups of everything once I get it off of this atrocious Dell that is just as old, if not a little moreso, than your wife's laptop. I also have to factor in that my iPod is 160GB, and that eventually I'd like to cram it full of movies and TV. Also of consideration is that with my current camera, I come home from some trips with up to 4GB of photos. An external drive is one option, but I haven't had good luck with those. I was thinking about making the investment in a Drobo, but I can't find anything on their site about how well those units play with laptops. I would assume, kinda like WiFi, that as long as you leave it powered up it doesn't necessarily need a connection to a computer.

There are a handful of minor UI changes that will be nice, but the biggest changes are in the backend (more 64-bit support and better thread handling). The value of the backend changes will really depend on what kind of work you are doing on the machine. For $29, I'd say it certainly doesn't hurt to upgrade in September when it is scheduled for release but Leopard will certainly not become obsolete because of the release of Snow Leopard.

Some of the speed increases that they mentioned yesterday make it worth it for me.

They said that they will be using threading more readily which will make using intensive software (Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) faster.

Also, they've changed some of the interface, most noticeably for things like Stacks. Not sure if you use that, but if you do, being able to preview a document in the stack before opening it, is a good thing.

It does seem :rolleyes: has gone to code :mad: in the rest of the forum. I'll stay hear.

Wicked storm. It seemed the thunder kept pounding away so I stayed in bed and slept once it stopped. Ok I stayed in too long. I was awaken by a very low flying plane, Time to get my act together and go to B&H. I need a larger camera bag.

And, being able to view the contents of a folder inside Stacks without having it open in a Finder window - finally!! :)

Why not pay a little more and get the 250GB drive? Or, buy the cheapest MBP and buy a 7200 RPM drive on the cheap through NewEgg or something? All it means is that the drive is not supported by Apple, but the rest of the warranty stays intact.

I would only use an external drive as a backup. I have been using a 120GB drive for my music and hate it. It means I have to be sitting at my desk with the drive and have it turned on (taking up a USB port).

My current dilemma is creating good backups. For my wife, I'm going to use a combination of a FireWire drive for Time Machine and a USB drive for User folder backup.

The chances of a drive failure are exactly the same between a Mac and a Windows system. They use the same drives. :confused:

I will be using FCP in the future. Will it help there?

Have a link for stacks? What is that program?

How much of the drive is taken up out of the box?

That in itself is a form of blocking :D

If anyone has a few computers that you are looking to back up (works best if you keep one of them on a lot), I can highly recommend CrashPlan. It's free, works on Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris, runs in the background and lets you back up your selection of files to an external drive, another computer on your network or even across the Internet to a friends computer (backups are encrypted before being sent/stored). I have tried many other backup solutions (open source, paid and home brewed) and this is by far the best product I have tried.

I recently upgraded my laptop and after installing CrashPlan on the new Mac, I restored my user directory from my file server and within ~2 hours my new Mac felt exactly like my old Mac. Very easy!

unless there is pre-installed software 0.

The problem is that with HD companies advertise as a "GB" is NOT a GB at all, they use a "1000MB=1GB" figure when the reality and software(windows, linux, macos, anything else) is a 1024MB=1GB
So you have a loss right there even before any formatting overhead!

HD Companies are quite deceptive in this, most of them have such a disclaimer at the very fine print if you buy a boxed Hd(haven't gotten one of those in ages!)

This all comes from the fact that 8bits are in 1 byte, which doesn't make nice 'round' figures, so the HD companies took it on themselves to round them off. Making a lot of :rolleyes: in the process.