Laptop advice, help...I suck... Options

[Guest_CANNONBALL_*]

I thought I would ping you guys for your personal or professional opinions on laptops. I figured the people on this forum are a bit more hip to this stuff than the mil or contractor boards.

I need one...asap. I don't need one of those indestructible powebooks or whatever they are called. I don't plan on throwing in a big pile of sand and shit.

needs to have good battery life, powerful enough to play some movies/games/wifi/etc.

although they may all have that capability now.

the last time I purchased one was in 97...so I am totally out of the loop. I'm sure I could just go to bestbuy and get one, but when throwing down more than a grand the last thing i want is buyer's remorse...you know?

I am not against getting a mac either. I have no platform loyalty...I just want to be sure that it's compatible with the formats used for gaming...because all work and no play makes jon a sad boy.

help please.

[zetec]

the only problem with getting a macbook/pro is that they still only come with one button, so if you're bootcamping to XP, you'll have to install a hack or something of the sort (or use an external mouse) to right click.

the hack isn't hard to find, and there's also some people that set up the motion sensor to right click. (they "tap" the computer next to but not actually on the mouse button, and it senses it)

uh... yeah... i brought it up... then it carried on from there and everyone else started talking about it, apparently they missed the bootcamp thing too.

and anyways, whoever said the wifi thingie about pc's versus laptops;

what the fuck are you talking about?

the 802.11x specifications are the exact same no matter what platform you're on. if you want it to auto-connect to whatever available AP has the best signal, you click one lil box in settings. the XPSP2 wifi interface works fine, although sometimes it can be a prick, as can pretty much any other wifi management program. (especially that intel proset shit... good card, bad software). same thing with the apple software. it may look prettier or something, but it all does the exact same thing. it's a ratified networking standard. if one worked differently, it wouldn't be able to interoperate. (*cough*cisco/aironet wifi compatibility mode pieces of shit*cough*)

The only management software that i've seen that ALWAYS does what it's supposed to is the bulky ass annoying cisco Aironet software, and that shit's pretty much fucking antique. user friendly it ain't, either.

so yeah. no reason to base your platform purchase on something as trivial as wifi management software. hell, you could run both xp and apple software if you bootcamped. same hardware, same protocol.