Pondering replacing D630 with 2.0GHz unibody MB

I'm having some sort of buyers regret about a Dell Latitude D630 I bought in August. It was about $550 shipped through Dell Outlet. It's been great and I had intentions of taking it with me to Iraq later this year.

I also own a Dell XPS M140, which was bought through the Dell Outlet in 2006. I've only had one problem with it in three years and that happened about a week ago. The CPU began overheating with 100% usage in about 20 minutes. I tore it down, replaced the thermal pads with Arctic Silver and blew the dust out of the fan. It hasn't overheated since I did that.

My wife currently uses the M140 for movies, internet, email and school work. My fear is something is going to happen to it while I'm gone and she won't be able to do any school work. It's out of warranty so costly repairs. And she knows very little about computers to buy a good replacement.

Now I'm thinking about giving her the D630 and buying a 2.0GHz unibody Macbook. I'd love a 15" Macbook Pro but that additional cost isn't worth it to me right now.

I have owned a G4 Mac Mini and a Core Duo Mac Mini in the past. I use an iPhone 3g as a phone after getting mad at WinMo's terrible battery life and constantly needing to soft reset the phone. At work I've used a Quad G5 Power Mac and 12" G4 Powerbook somewhat extensively. I love OS X and think its a pretty OS. I also love Apple's design on all their professional products and I'm really happy to see an almost-12" PB replacement in the aluminum Macbook.

Regardless of what notebook I take it will mostly be used for movies, light gaming (I have Starcraft, Diablo II and Warcraft III in mind since they are native Mac, but I'd also like to take some other games such as Dawn of War, Morrowind, etc, that I'd like to play through again.) I will also be taking a PS2 with some games so I won't be stuck soley gaming on a Macbook.

Other than that movies will be the next biggest use. I have about 250GB of XviD encoded .avi on an NTFS external hard drive. I can easily format the drive as FAT32 so I can read/write directly. And I've read there are codecs for Quicktime that allow for xvid and .avi files so not much of a problem there if its true.

Other than that internet, email, IM and what not. Maybe some light photo work through iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom.

I do have an unused Vista Home Premium license with x86 and x64 installation discs. I'm not sure if you can do x64 Boot Camps but either would be fine for me as it would just soley be used for Windows gaming or something that I can't do in OS X.

I have a Seagate 7200.3 320GB hard drive coming this week that I intended to put in the D630. I would put it into a Macbook instead and buy 4GB of DDR3 to use as well.

I'm just trying to decide if it's worth it to buy one now to take with me to the desert for a year. At some point I would like to try to switch almost completely to Apple other than maybe something to play Windows games on.

 

First off, thank you for your service to the country.

I believe that if you don't have a web cam, the Macbook or Macbook Pro will be useful since the camera is integrated. You can chat with your wife.

If she has little computer knowledge, the Macbook would be better suited for her. The D620 is more durable for travel for you.

 

I'd suggest the 2.4 Unibody simply because of the backlit keyboard. You can't appreciate how useful it is until you've used one.

 

That's really true. I didn't think that I would use the back-lit keyboard at all, but when I got the 2.0GHz MB, I couldn't really see the keys at all at night. I traded it in for a 2.4GHz, and I don't know what I would do without the back-lit keyboard.

 

Thanks for the responses.

I went to Best Buy earlier to look at the Macbooks and 15" Macbook Pro. I wasn't happy with any of the screens. They were overly glossy. I also don't know if I can get used to the low resolution on the MB. I've been used to 1440x900 on my D630 and 1920x1200 on my desktop. And I've always been a matte guy.

I think I'm going to wait it out over the next year. Hopefully they will bring matte back to the lineup, at least on the 15" MBP. Another miracle would be a higher resolution but I doubt that.

My wife will be finished with school by the time I return. I will go back to school. I will probably major in journalism, public relations or photography. I think I will just wait to get a MBP.

I'm going to try to keep up on the line while I'm gone because I'm hoping to get back and buy one soon after By then maybe I'll have enough saved up to replace both our notebooks at one time.

 

There are options now if you want a matte screen. Theres one company that will replace the panel with a matte version for around 200$, and another one that seems to sell almost like a screen protector that is matte. Not sure about the quality of either one of these, but if you really needed one now, its an option.

Though it seems like you can wait to see if they introduce a matte option, so thats good.