After my last post about thinking of getting a Mac computer, I had quite few people saying I should take another look at them. I have actually popped into the computer store a couple of times but each time the Macbook Pro crashed! ( Once with Logic Express, once with Front Row).

But my main computer is seriously dying. Even sat on a bed of frozen peas it now gets so hot that it’s impossible to do any music recording. Tomorrow I’m going to send it in to have its insides vacuumed and cleaned ( just think of all the chalk and junk that must be inside). Now I’m on my very old computer, which is super tiny, but super slow! So just in case the spring cleaning doesn’t work I’m going to have to buy a new main laptop. The thing is from January you’re only going to be able to buy Windows Vista PCs, and they look like they are going to be so slow and throw up a whole bunch of problems with software compatibility that I figured it might be worthwhile taking a proper look at the Macs again.

This time I had a look at the Macbooks, instead of the top of the range Mac Book Pro. With a price tag that is almost half, they’re a great bargain and the performance is pretty much the same, it looks like it’s basically the screen size that’s different.

I had 30 minutes spare so I decided to write a song o Garageband in the store. No latency problems, very quick to use, that is nice! It’s so easy to throw some ideas together, a definite “want to have” package ( along with the DTP software). So I ended up spending the next few hours at the apple store figuring out solutions to all the downsides of switching to a Mac.

* Microsoft Office: Use Openoffice.org (it’s free)
* Fonts: Apparently the Macs can read Windows True Type fonts!
* Music software: Ableton Live works on the Mac. As do many of my, very expensive, software synthesisers.
* Spam: The biggest problem I deal with, but the Mac won’t help here, it’ll still keep blocking legitimate mails and people will still have difficulty getting my emails.

I’ll miss the big screen, but I don’t think I’d feel comfortable carrying a 360,000 Yen 17″ power book everywhere. And I need to make the right choice as 95% of my work is on a computer everyday, and I don’t want to find there’s a big chunk of work I can’t do on the Mac. But adding in the iLife packages, the small size and price of the Macbook and I think it might be the one to go for? What do you think?

Update: Just found a problem! Apparently the Mac notebooks can’t power small USB hard drives. Plus they can’t write to hard drives that are Windows formatted. You can format them for Mac, but then Windows machines can’t read them. I’ve got loads of drives with a ton of data on them…. ahhh