OT: MacBookPro advice needed.

[Sarah Reichelt]

> I'd like advice in two areas .....
>
> 1. Should I buy the 13-inch or the 15-inch ?
> I can compare the screen sizes, and the resolution and even the relative
> weights.
> But I don't have a realistic idea of how much faster the Intel i5 is over
> the older Dual Core.
> So any advice about performance, or pointers to reliable benchmark sites for
> Mac ?

As I understand it, the new Intel i5 is not that much faster than the
old Dual Core, but the new graphics architecture makes the new
MacBooks way faster than the old models, even if this is not obvious
from the basic CPU speed.


> 2. I plan to dual-boot or triple-boot OSX, Win 7 and Linux (some kind).
> Probably just using Bootcamp, but I might want to use VmWare or other VM
> later.
> Any advice on setting the machine up to make this easy ?

Just get the biggest hard drive you can.

My kids use BootCamp because they want to be able to play all the modern games.
I use Sun's Virtual Box which is free, but doesn't have the
performance of BootCamp. But I can switch to it without rebooting and
it runs Rev fine.
Parallels (& I think Fusion but I'm not sure) has the ability to run
rom your BootCamp partition, so you can have both systems and just
choose the one that meets your needs at the time.

Cheers,
Sarah