Need Help Outfitting My MacBook Pro

L

Lone Star

500+ Posts
First, I want to again thank they many people on this board with the recommendations for my Dell Laptop that went into the ditch. I reinstalled XP and the machine(more or less) is back to normal.

However, I will be buying a MacBook Pro as I am tired of the Microsoft OS and failures with my Dell Inspirion.

What I need – advice on what software and peripherals I will need to make the conversion. If you hate Mac or thinking I am making a poor decision, fine. But if it is not constructive , please keep the comments to yourself. I just would appreciate constructive suggestions as I am committed to this path.

I am likely buying more machine than I need and I am fine with extra dollars for a wider screen and more horsepower (which is why I waited to buy until the upgrade was completed).

Current Uses:

I currently use an XP machine at the office. I am interested using XP programs on the MacBook. I use my home machine for the following:
All of the MS Office application ((Currently Word, PPT, XLS)
iTunes (5000 titles)
10,000 photos
Limited music editing (Do not use anything now but would like to be able to edit music files)
Limited photo editing (Currently use a low-end Adobe product / not PhotoShop)
Wireless connectivity is Extremely important
Manage my finances (Currently use Quicken)
EM (Currently use Outlook)
720P Video files – 16:9 aspect ratio – sometimes played on the screen, other times

Machine I am planning to buy:

15-inch MacBook Pro
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed; or 2.5GHz or 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB L2 cache
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support; 256MB of GDDR3 memory on 2.4GHz configuration

Recommendations (Questions):
Do I need to upgrade the machine at purchase?
Should I buy Office for Mac or iWork?
Do I need yo buy Quicken for the Mac?
Should I buy VM Fusion so I can run work applications?
Is there a limit to the XP apps that I can run?

Wireless: Should I buy the Linksys Wireless N router?

What am I missing?
 
How much RAM are you buying? Thats really the only upgrade I would do, especially for photo/video editing.

If you don't want to drop the cash for Office, you can always download open office for free (www.openoffice.org). There are a few other free options out there as well, though I can't speak to them but open office is great. Personally, I would go that route.

If you are dual booting with Windows/OS X, I don't think you will have a limit on the XP apps you can run, though I'm not really sure about this as my experience with it is quite limited.

I use Netgear for my wireless needs and I love it. Have used Linksys products in the past and while they worked fine, they had their uptime issues. The netgear products I use rarely ever need a restart (one time in the past ~6 months at the most) while the Linksys products required a restart every week or so.
 
If you use MS Exchange for email, or use all kinds of features (calendar, contacts, scheduling) for Outlook, you'll want Entourage for Mac.

Same thing with MS Office. If you use it a lot, you'll want Office for Mac. If not, you can probably get away without.
 
I'm was in a similar situation as you. I had a employer-owned Dell laptop. that wasnt very reliable. After 4 yrs I was given to option of an IBM or mac laptop. I picked the Mac, thinking I'd need the VM fusion, but 6 months later I decided I dont need to run XP. This is what I've added to my Mac.

2GB ram worked fine for me, but I don't work with photo/video editing

added:
MS office
adium (instant messenging)
iterm (terminal emulation)
Thunderbird with Lightning plugin (calender)
firefox

I'm still using a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I get a full strength signal from the 2nd floor to the opposite end of my house on the first floor.
 
Consider the Apple Airport Extreme N router. It works great, is simple to manage, and can also function as a printer server and network hard drive interface. There's also the version with a built in hard drive.
 
stupidgringo beat me to it. If you can hold off about 3 months i would. There are big rumors of the redesign coming. If nothing else you can save you a few bucks while places clear out their old gens and get you a better price on the current design
 
I highly recommend VMware Fusion. I have been running it on my MacBook Pro since August last year and it has been pretty much flawless. I have 3GB of RAM and I assign half of that to the VM and the other goes to the Mac OS (of course the Mac gets all RAM resources back when I exit the VM).

I have found no barriers running XP Pro under Fusion. I just need a few Windows apps for work, and when I migrated everything over from Windows (using VMware Converter) it all just worked. Converter is used to create an image of your existing Windows machine, which can then be imported into Fusion.

Do not buy RAM from Apple, huge markup through them.

I second the suggestion re: waiting for a product refresh on the MacBook Pro line -- could be very soon.
 
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