new home computer

Caoimhín

Hey all,

Im and its grand for the occasional times i bring it around with me (very occasionally)

What i need a home computed for is basically, word, spreadsheets, internet, storing files but i really dont store that much info, movies and ever play games. Most imoportantly i need a large screen for mapping using government mapping, GIS and GPS systems. This lapton, even with a great signal has trouble with loading maps and overlaying.

I kind of fancy one of those Apple Macs as i like the big screen and flat key pad. Thing is, is it easy to convert Microsoft word/exel etc from one to the other.

Ok, maybe watching some net documentaries is a little important...

My price range is some where between €800 - €1200 (maybe a trip to Enniskillen might be on the cards)

Thanks in advance.

Oh yeah, what the feck is with this laptop that when i hit a key it moves the curserback a few lines, leaving me half the time cutting andpasting#/

cantthinkof1

Are you looking for a laptop or a PC?

Your current laptop is struggling with maps doe to 1 or 2 reasons. Either there is not enough ram e.g. less that 1Gb or the graphics card is a bit weak and struggles to render the images.
Maping is very hungry for power and memory.

So if mapping is important you need a lpatop/pc with a DEDICATED graphics card and memory. So avoid systems with INTEGRATED graphics chips and SHARED system memory. With your budget of €800 -€1200 you will get all you need and more.

I dont know much about Apple but my opinion is that they are overpriced there is a huge premium for the brand. I have an Acer Aspire laptop, its my 3rd in total and I have reccommended them to friends and family with 4 others buying on my say so. All delighted.
Mine is 2 yrs old and has 4Gb ram and a seperate NVidia 9600mGT graphics card with its own 512Mb of ram and a 17" high def widescreen. Thats the kind of spec you need. 2 yras ago I paid €700 for this so your budget is huge.
For the record I got all mine from www.laptopsdirect.ie they are good. Prices are great and delivery to your door with in 48 hours.

MS Office is available for the MAC so sending .doc or .xls etc files between MAC & PC systems is no problem.

Hope this helps you some.

woolymammoth

would have to agree with cantthinkof1 for the most part.

personally i dont think there's a lot of value in laptops out there at the moment. I'd say you should be looking at the equivalent of mid-low end gaming systems, as they'd cope better with layers of maps. A minimum of 512MB of graphics memory, a minimum of 3GB, preferably 4GB of RAM, and maybe an i5 intel core processor. That, very generally, is the kind of numbers you should be looking for. Everything else is personal preference, like optical drives, screen size, etc. Any laptop that will do GIS mapping or anthing like that will have no problems with web, video, office..

As an example, this dell isn't bad.

Apple are overpriced for what you get. It's made with intel hardware, just like a PC, so it can be hard to justify the difference in price sometimes. You can get office for the mac. you can get software to put windows on a mac. but personally, i wouldn't take a mac as a free paperweight, never mind paying for one, but that's just me.

marco_polo

This is how much iMac €1200 gets you

http://store.apple.com/ie/configure/MC508B/A?mco=MTg1ODMzNTg

A dual core i3 processor with a 4GB Ram, 500Gb hard disk and a ATI HD4670 hard drive.

Exact same specs delivered with a 21.5" LG LED monitor delivered and build for 627 (+ 30 euro delivery) from hardwareversand.de (a german site used by alot of people in the building and upgrading forum). You would need to factor in the price of windows, office, a UK format Keyboard and mouse on top of this (Another €200 tops). This could be upgraded to (I would reccomend this option) an quad core i5 (add about another €70) system with an Nvidia GT 460 graphics card (add about another €80), a vastly superior CPU and Graphics cards combo for another €150 or thereabouts, still coming in under a grand all in.

Fanny Cradock

Assuming you are using something like ArcGIS, you are not going to need a super high end system. You are looking at fairly low end CPU, maybe 4GB RAM, a basic GPU and 250 - 500GB HDD. Additionally, you must check to see what OS the GIS programme you are running supports. As far as I could tell, ArcGIS only supports Windows OS - so there would be no point in buying a Mac.

To be perfectly honest, I would think that spending €1200 on a laptop would be a waste of money. For example, I built a desktop that is better than the Mac Marco Polo linked to for about €500 less.

Unless you require the mobility a laptop affords, you should purchase a desktop because the simple fact is they are better value for money at component level, especially if you avoid Dell etc and either build a system yourself (not difficult) or order a bespoke system.

You can test if your your current system meets the min requirements to run ArcGIS here.

I would also recommend that you do a clean up of your current laptop by running something like Malwarebytes, CCleaner (it will hopefully clear a lot of space) whatever AV programme you have and defrag your drive.