macbook vs dells

[kitkat12012]

i'm planning to buy a new laptop, just wondering if you guys have any suggestions.

 

i'm currently looking at getting a macbook, but then i figured that i could get a dell for the same price with better hardware, or if i get a dell with the same hardware configuration of that macbook, i might be able to get it cheaper.

 

also, i haven't had any experiences with macs, and i have a lot of experience with dells (pcs), which means if my hardware goes bad, i'd know how to troubleshoot/fix a dell and i'd know nothing about a mac.

 

 

but i really do wanna try having a mac

 

 

 

do you guys have any suggestions? pros and cons for either side?

 

macbook, and use bootcamp to get windows on it... or dell (any other pc) and get osx86 on it?

[devilhood]

i'm planning to buy a new laptop, just wondering if you guys have any suggestions.

 

i'm currently looking at getting a macbook, but then i figured that i could get a dell for the same price with better hardware, or if i get a dell with the same hardware configuration of that macbook, i might be able to get it cheaper.

 

also, i haven't had any experiences with macs, and i have a lot of experience with dells (pcs), which means if my hardware goes bad, i'd know how to troubleshoot/fix a dell and i'd know nothing about a mac.

but i really do wanna try having a mac

do you guys have any suggestions? pros and cons for either side?

 

macbook, and use bootcamp to get windows on it... or dell (any other pc) and get osx86 on it?

 

It is a tough choice if you base this purely on performance, honestly though, if it is down to asthetics and quality construction, go with an Apple.

 

I've got my Dell XPS M1530 (T9300 with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT) dual booting GUID Vista and Mac OS X 10.5.4 with PC EFI V8 and it works almost flawlessly. This is all thanks to the consistent efforts of Chun-Nan and Superhai, to name a couple; if it wasn't for these guys, us Dell users wouldn't have it quite as good as we do now.

We can even use a vanilla 10.5 Leopard DVD to install the Mac if you follow the BOOT-132 method.

 

The only gripes at the moment are the lack of Marvell Yukon ethernet compatibility and Media Card slot support.

You can solve the ethernet issue by using an Apple Ethernet USB adapter.

EFI Strings work fine with the NVIDIA cards if you stick to using 10.5.2 graphics kext's, or if you prefer to stay up-to-date, use Gotoh's NVinject with a changed IOProbeScore of 0.

Sound works if you dump your codec and manually patch using Taruga's AppleHDA 1.16, or if you use the pre-patched kext which requires a Sleep/Wake routine in-order for the sound to initialize properly.

Even the built-in webcam and Biometric Fingerprint Scanner work

The battery is detected without any issues, along with Sleep/Wake and Clamshell working as it should using Superhai's kexts.

 

The NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card is also highly overclockable if you plan on doing some gaming in Vista.

I've flashed my card BIOS to 620 core/820 mem. I used RivaTuner 2.09 to test frequencies and ATITool 0.27b4 to monitor temps and artifacting. It is totally stable even after prolonged periods.. that's a 30% gain in speed!

 

So yeah, because I'm a heavy gamer, Dell was my choice; but if I wasn't such a gamer, I'd have bought a Macbook Pro already.

 

Macgirl created a thread for us XPS users, I normally hang out there along with sonotone and Superhai.

Please visit if you want to follow kext development progress or ask general compatibility questions.

 

Hope this helps you to make a decision,

 

P.