Maximum PC

I am contemplating upgrading my laptop this year and will be graduating with a degree in web design. I have experience with html, css, php, C#, and VB. Can I use these types of codes and others on a Apple laptop or should I stick with a pc laptop.

Get a dual core, at least 4 GB of memory, and a dedicated graphics card (up to you, but I wouldn't buy a laptop without it).

You can do that on any machine, but if you want to be serious about any .NET languages, PC and Windows is pretty much the only way to go.

4GB of ram is a must. You could do it on a Mac if you use virtual machines, but I'd just go the pure Windows route.

VMs will be desirable anyway, but definitely you want to work on Windows. Much less hassle, things just work for .NET.

If you have no plans of developing anything outside of the Windows platform, stick with Windows. Dreamweaver works well in both environments, and .NET exists primarily for Windows anyways.

I'm going to convert my Macbook Pro into a dual boot scenario. Mac OS X has Bootcamp, where you can dual boot between OS X and Windows, but that scenario is only cost effective if you want to extend beyond .NET and start dabbling in objective-c and Cocoa Development (which I intend on doing). If you intend on doing stuff like RoR, OS X has Aquamacs Emacs which has plug-ins for RoR development (e.g., you can have irb run inside of AquaMacs and do your ruby irb testing). Otherwise, I'd stick with a pure Windows solution if you have zero plans of going towards that route.

Actually, I'm in the same league as the poster, except that I plan on RoR development, objective-c and cocoa, and .NET development.

I currently have a Core 2 Duo, 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro w/ 4GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD. I'm doing the following upgrades:

- 2 x 4GB DDR3 SODIMM's for a total of 8GB of RAM (and that's the max)
- Swap the current 500GB HDD for a 500GB 7200 rpm, hybrid drive from Seagate (500GB drive w/ a 4GB NAND memory cache for extra speed)
- Dual boot Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard); 200GB for Windows and 300GB for OS X

I plan on getting a NAS for network storage, 2 x 500GB portable drives for mobile storage and use the 1TB Iomega drive I presently have for Time Machine. I have no plans on using a VM for the same reason that if I need to use Windows, I'll just boot to Windows. I could use VMWare Fusion, but my biggest concern is RAM usage.

This laptop will serve as my single purpose machine doing everything. OS X will be used for both development (objective-c/RoR) and Aperture 3 (photography stuff), Windows will be more for SQL Server Express and .NET Development. The portable drives will be where I store all of my development files and such. So yeah, I've got a plan and a roadmap. What he wants can be done on Mac, but personally, unless he intends on moving towards open source systems such as PHP or RoR, Windows suits him just fine.

You only need a Mac for Mac specific stuff. He does not need it for Open Source, PHP, RoR, etc. That could be done on Windows just fine. Or Linux (free).

Unless you want to develop for Apple products, there is zero reason to pay the price premium of a Macbook.

OP, what is your budget?

Well, you can do a designing a web in all kind of laptop or the desktop. Just have a let say standard parts of an machine like at least 4gb then the video card is minimum of 1gb. I think you can design much better of a web site if you have that kind of parts of a machine.

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