Latest comments

Are Laptop Batteries Supposed To Squeak?

Oooh, Lenovo X300 looks nice...

Thanks! It hasn't done it for a couple of days now, so I'm --kidding myself-- hopeful that it's better now!

Tristan

Squeaky goodness! I have a feeling I'll be reading the news soon and see an article about a Viao laptop exploding on a train to London. Good luck!

It *will* eat you. Then it *will* raid your bank account and wire all your money directly to the California mafia. Then there *will* be a big shootout and the mafia *will* come looking for you wanting more.

And all you'll have to defend yourself with is the fact that you can use two fingers at once on the trackpad to simulate a right click. You *will* lose.

I've read that you can hold a control button, or use two fingers on the trackpad; guess that would be ok? Aww, I thought I'd managed to cross at least one option off the list!

Andrew (the other other one, or not)

You can configure Macs to have two mouse buttons, despite there only being one mechanical blob.

If I was going to move to OS X then I'd agree, but if I did buy a mac, I'd have to run certain Windows applications on it; I can't transfer the licenses to OS X, and don't want to have to buy them again (would double the cost).

In that sense, it's more like trying to use RISC OS on a Windows laptop: all 3 buttons would be quite critical, but the laptop would only have two. Sure, you can press both buttons at the same time to simulate the third button, but that seems to go wrong as often as it goes right.

Although I'm sure one button makes perfect sense in OS X, I can't help feeling that it would be a right pain in Windows, especially when you need a third button on occasion. Plugging in an external mouse would work, but it isn't always going to be an option.

I agree that it seems a bit extreme to disregard an entire range of machines just because they're one mouse button short, but usability for my common tasks has to be a major consideration.

The question has to be: will the overall experience the macbook gives me be as good or better when running windows apps, compared to the other laptops I'm considering. Although the nice magnetic power cable would be nice, and having OS X would be a bonus, I'd find it hard to justify buying for style over function.

William Black

That's like not leaving Acorn to move to the PC, as Acorns require THREE mouse buttons... it would be a totally insane and somewhat French thing to consider.

Aye - I think that would get on my nerves.

You pay a lot of money to only get one mouse button in a Mac...

Bud

My mate has an eee and they are very nice machines for the money.

I used to use Macs daily years ago and still have a hankering for a return to macos, which is more palletable now thanks to being able to run windows nativaly on their machines.

Mmm, that's kinda what I'm thinking - I need to get a mac for development purposes, so two birds one stone and all that. Although I'd be paying the apple tax, I'd probably save overall.

The main reason I didn't consider one in the past was that I need a lot of windows software, but being able to dual boot for games and run applications natively has almost sold it to me. Almost.

But the pro is relatively heavy, non-pro not much lighter but underpowered, and air pretty much useless. And they all only have one mouse button.

Mac Book Pro. For a developer being able to run both OSes natively would seem to be a God-send... and MacOS really is much nicer to use. I'm about to get a Mac Book Pro myself. Now you can run Windows applications in MacOS and it looks like it is runing natively, which is nice if you want to use MacOS as your main system.

The EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeePC looks nice, but more as a toy than your main machine to work on for several days a week.

Thinkpads are kinda expensive, and they look ugly. And have those stupid nipple things. And the ones that have the features I'm after are kinda heavy. But yes, good machines; worth considering.

An EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeePC. Obviously.

That or a thinkpad. I really like them, especially the old ones before they got 'lenovoed'. Expensive I hear though...

Monitor Joy

Thanks for asking, but no more floods here, touch wood! Think other parts of the country might be in trouble, but so far nothing here. Although the storm did delay my journey home the other day; took me 4 and a half hours. Bleh :p

I suppose that now his cellar of world domination is flooded, he'll have to send off for a new monitor again.

I hope Dell Denmark will give the same service, should the need arise. Supposedly, they're not as easy to work with.

Are you getting more floods? I see from the news that there's lots of wind and rain over there.

Harsh! They fixed it, what more could I want? :)

I'd have given them grief. But that's just me. I'd probably have burned their factory down as well.