One thing you will find though is that although there is a premium for the hardware the long term software cost is lower since your not being nickel and dimed for every little utility you need.

There are lots of software packages out there for free for osx. Its stupid to pay like $40 for an application like a cd label printing program yet windows users are generaly forced to do that sort of thing day in and day out.

Most windows users resort to shareware but technicaly they should still be paying $20 or so for software. Over the course of the life of the machine the software charges add up.

 

Not to overstate this, but you just about want to buy extra RAM *first*, and have it waiting to install when the computer comes home before you even boot it up the first time. Just be aware that Macs are finicky about regarding IC timings, so pay the extra $10 or so for memory qualified to work in your box, to avoid nasty problems. Dealmac has an excellent page called dealRam to find quality, inexpensive memory.

 

This Powerbook started out with about 2.5 hours per charge. Then went downhill. The poor battery performance is actually something that's been noted about this model. Hope they figure it out, because it's about the only flaw, and it's a dandy.

Also, the keyboard is not all that sturdy against claws. In case you have a huge dog who likes to type... I do.

 

How much are extra batteries? I doubt I'll need one, but from what the computer tells me I should get at least 2.5 hours on a charge from the beginning.

 

Not sure about the cost of batteries. Mine were replace for free, but I'm not sure if that's because the warranty really covered them or if my husband stood there and gave the Apple guys the stink eye...

 

My trusty old Dell Inspiron gets about 4 hours to a single battery charge, sometimes more. That may actually be worse than getting 2.5 in your powerbook, because it's 4 hours with Windows - I'd rather have half that with OS X.

Good point, hiram! One of these days I'll upgrade, just like I did with my car.

 

I would love a PowerBook, but I really can't afford one.

However, no matter the laptop I would run a good desktop Linux on it, like MEPIS because I'm just as sick of Windows as the next guy, or gal. I'm running it on my old P400 Toshiba and it's beautiful, although a bit slow, but so was XP.

I'm actually running Debian Linux on my old PowerPC G3 Beige minitower as a webserver. It's been up 194 days without a hiccup. I started using the some of the software that's standard equipment in Linux distros on Mac OSX via the Fink program where you can download debian packages of software compiled for OSX, like The GIMP and XMMS, two excellent open-source projects.

Once you get comfortable with Linux, Windows becomes even more of a pain in the *** to use. There's so many features that make life a lot easier in KDE, it's hard to enumerate them all, until I sit at a Windows machine.

MEPIS is an excellent Linux distro, it's based on Debian so there's over 12,000 (or whatever it's at now) packages of software available for it, and it's a live, installable CD so that means you just pop it in, reboot and it runs straight from the CD without installing or even touching the HD, unless you want to. Usually takes about 15 minutes to install on my 1Ghz Celeron, faster on better machines.