Got a tech question...

[stillane]

Hi all. Yes, it's another one of those posts. No, it's not nearly as high drama.

My question is this:

Biff the Laptop has been experiencing some fairly dramatic technical difficulties. I'm carting him off to the wizards on Wednesday, but I have the horrible fear they are going to inform me that he has gone the way of the dodo. Should that be the case, I'm wondering what you informed types would recommend in the way of Biff the Sequel.

The issues in question:

I'm broke. I do, however, have some theoretical graduation funds to put towards the newbie. I need something reliable and fairly tough, preferably something that can handle the sort of data processing that your average fangirl is prone to do, and something that will hang in there through the next stint of higher education. The Powerbooks are attempting to seduce me with their wily ways, but I've been a Windows girl for many years now. Will any of my accoutrements (DVD burner, external harddive, etc.) work with an Apple? Is it worth relearning all the basics? Is the 12-inch too small, and would the 15-inch refurbish be trustworthy? If the techs tell me Biff the First can be fixed, how much is it worth to sink into a four year old Dell Inspiron 2600? I really have no idea what to do.

Any suggestions?

Given that the thesis is coming due abominably soon, this does not please me. Nope. Not at all. Murphy, you are so toast when I catch you.

(Incidentally, this is the newest of the reasons why I haven't been reading all the gorgeous fic or ogling all the pretty pictures you've all been putting out. I haven't even seen last week's Supernatural yet. *sigh* I am cave-girl, hauling all her books and articles behind her for the next 18 days, until the Evil That Ate My Soul is turned in at the bio office. After graduation, though, I intend to go into a fandom-induced coma.)

Comments

[theantimodel.livejournal.com]

Eeee! You will love it once you get used to it, I swear. And I will totally answer any questions you've got. Also, if you haven't already, you should consider friending isilya, she's a mac girl and gives handy hints and tricks and bootleg applications out like candy for fellow mac geeks.

[stillane.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Haven't actually made the acquaintance of the lady in question, although I'm familiar with the name. I'll skip on over and say hello. Thanks for the heads up.

I'll keep you posted on the technological joy. *g* I'm not sure whether there are any web editing programs included in the bundle, but at some point I need to skip on over and fix 'Cohesion'. It managed to mangle itself for no apparent reason when I wasn't looking. *sigh* All thing more complex than the wheel seem to hate me this week. Maybe it's a good thing the new baby needs to ship. Might give it time for the bad mojo to wear off. *g*

[theantimodel.livejournal.com]

isilya is totally awesome, you definitely should :D

For reference in 3 days when you get the computer, here's my list of favorite free applications:

Acquisition. For p2p file sharing, good for music downloading.
Adium. A good instant messaging program, works with AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
Azureus. for bittorrenting.
CharCounter. A nifty, no frills little app that counts characters and words when you cut and paste into it.
Cocktail. A general purpose maintenence utility. os x has a set of maintenence scripts set to run at like 4 or 5 am but most people shut their computers down or put them to sleep at night so cocktail will let you choose when to run them (and more.)
Firefox. Great web browser; useful extensions: flashblock, tabs mix plus: saves your sessions in case of crashes and more.
igetter. A good download manager for os x.
mplayer. A nice, simple media player for avi files.
Quicksilver. The best thing to happen to os x ever. especially if you're on a laptop and you're completely reliant on your keyboard and track pad. This tutorial might be helpful.
Smultron. A really nice, non processor intensive html and text editor (unlike dreamweaver if all you want to do it edit html.) I love this app a lot.
vlc media player. Another media player, much like mplayer but it can sometimes be useful to have both just in case one doesn't want to play a fil and another one does.
xjournal. My favorite of the available downloadable livejournal clients.

Lastly, it's not free but it is a good ftp application: transmit.

[stillane.livejournal.com]

Whee! Thank you. I'll definitely be trawling through all of these, as soon as the Magic MacBook Machine arrives.