5400 Vs. 7200 ... 2GB Vs. 4GB in MBP

I purchased Asus G1 two month ago and I'm not hapy with the performance at all. I'm a graphic designer, and Architecture engineer. I use these programs:

- Photoshop
- Dreamweaver & flash
- 3ds Max
- Autocad
- Corel Draw
- Adobe premiere & Ulead media studio for video editing
- MS office
- Arcview GIS
and some other programs.

I do not play games at all, the reason i purchased my G1 is the hardware (2ghz processor, 2GB ram, 160 HDD & 512MB video card) but i don't feel this power in my laptop, everything opens slowly. I'm using Vista ultimate by the way... so I decided to give macbook Pro a shot and placed my order yesterday (MBP 2.4 processor, 15" screen, 2GB ram, 160 HDD 5400RPM, 256MB video card)

here are my qustions:

1- what makes MAC faster than my currect laptop? almost same configuration. Is it the difference in hardware make that speed difference?

2- I have a problem with the 5400RPM HDD in my current laptop, it takes forever to load windows and files.... would I have the same problems with MAC? should I upgrade the MBP to 7200 HDD? is there a noticable difference?

3- would the 2GB of RAMS in MBP enough for my work? should I upgrade to 4GB of RAMS? I'll run windows Vista in parallel with OSX.

4- Did I made a good decission choosing MBP for my kind of work?

Thanks guys for the great help you give to the community.

 

1- The current OSX does not use much RAM, applications load very fast, even if you perhaps, click on all the apps in your dock, they would all open normally, from what I have seen.

2- It is not necessary to upgrade from 5400 to 7200, but seeing the work that you do, it would be more preferable, especially with the video editing.

3- 2GB should be enough, but the apps you use, use lots of RAM... Again its your choice, same as the HDD.. if you want superb performance with these programs, add in more RAM and go for the 7200RPM (If you can)

I suggest that you don't add in a 1GB stick, that would cause you to lose dual channel capability, go with 4GB.. buy your RAM from another computer store, that would save you over 700 bucks.

4- Certainly, macs are known for their good performance with multimedia apps


Oh yeah, check out these video reviews; http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=jon4lakers

In one part of the review, he opens all the apps in the dock and they all open very fast, like normal.

 

Do you need Vista? Do you run any background programs, specially antivirus software? The G1 should be beefy enough. Of course, depending on the amount of disk I/O your work requires, the HDD might be the culprit. But then you say even Windows takes a long time to load so...
Consider using XP instead of Vista in the MBP. Since you do a lot of 3D Work, you will be restricted to bootcamp - while Parallels and VMWare Fusion have 3D support, I doubt it is good enough to intensive 3D apps. You might give them a try since there are demo versions available though.
I guess you made as good as a choice as you could, regarding Apple laptops. It is hard to say if it'll be enough for your needs.

 

Yup, definitely get away from vista for your kind of work. You need all the power you can get for your apps, not eye candy in the user interface.

One important thing to note though; for programs like AutoCAD (and I think 3ds Max) which don't exist for OS X, you will have to run windows under bootcamp. While there are no performance penalties for doing this, running windows on the MBP is going to be no faster, or slower, than running windows on an identically spec'd pc.

Also, if you do want to work natively in OS X you are going to have to purchase OS X versions of any of your existing software. Some companies offer discounts for platform "cross grades" (particularly really expensive software) but I would check this thoroughly before hand, it is not terribly common.

The 7200 rpm drive will help, so will the extra ram. You are however well into the land of diminishing returns for your money. I run the majority of those programs under XP on a two year old desktop with 2gb ram just fine.

Most likely checking your task manager (or whatever the vista version of that is), and then permanently disabling whatever unused services vista or asus pre-installed on your system is going to help you get what you're looking for.

edit: the 20% gain in clockspeed going from 2.0-2.4 ghz will certainly help your cause as well.

 

the hardware on these computers are both very similar, the only difference everyone is explaining is mainly osx vs vista. vista is still buggy at the moment and is a ram hog. asus is generally not too bad with bloatware although removing it will speed up your machine and seeing the programs you use im sure you would only have the windows version because they are quite expensive programs that your not going to want to re-purchase (im also an architecture student i know all too well how much these things are) and also you will be mostly likely running xp/vista most of the time so you will run into very similar difficulties. and also your losing the right click in the mbp.

 

thank you guys for your help, I took your opinion and upgraded my HDD to 7200. About the RAMs, I'll work with the 2GB and later will upgrade to 4GB (more cheaper to do it myself)

 

will osx 10.4 even read 4gb of ram?

just a FYI- its better to say Mac than MAC. if ur ever in any hardcore mac forums and you say MAC some of the members can get pretty upset. dont ask why.

 

hehe sorry, I'm new not only here but in Mac world.

 

It sounds to me like the primary reason for the slowness on your G1 is due in large part to the 5400RPM drive. If Windows is loading slowly on a modern PC, it's usually for one or two reasons. The most common is that there are a lot of backround applications loading and running while you work. Those would slow it down a lot both at boot and in everyday usage. The second common reason is running a 5400RPM HDD, which while generally not a problem, can start to become one when you're really pushing the system in disk I/O intense situations.

The MBP with the 5400RPM drive would be very, very, close in performance to your G1 when running the same OS, and applications (assuming there isn't a bunch of backround stuff running on the G1 install of Vista). A clean install of Windows might be what would make the difference in your situation on the G1. Regardless, with getting the 7200RPM drive in the MBP you should see a nice improvement because of that; not really because of "Mac" hardware as it's the same great stuff that's in Windows based notebooks.