( 7 reviews )
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Posted: 11-22-2007
I've used Dell business-class (Lattitude) notebooks since the 90's, and bought one of these for my wife as a replacement for her iMac. Since I was going to move over her applications and reload a fresh copy of the O/S anyway, I took the opportunity to see whether or not this was good enough for a multi-O/S development platform. First, my company writes storage diagnostic software and we support 32 & 64 bit versions of just about every O/S there. We can't use emulated operating systems or peripherals since the software talks directly to hardware. That is why I have to actually install and boot multiple operating systems rather than use an emulation product or even VMWare. I had no problems getting this to quadruple-boot Vista64; Fedora LINUX; Windows 2008 and OS X. Didn't get a chance to try Solaris or BSD, but it probably would have worked fine. I didn't run into any software compatibility problems other than some printer-driver limitations. (So make sure your favorite printer has drivers). If you're a windows-only person (I pity you, BTW), then this makes a very nice Windows PC, and I suggest making this a dual-boot machine, but just add a 3rd partition that can be used by both operating systems, so you can use that to save programs, data, whatever that can be used by whatever operating system you want to use at the time. No reason to repeat other things people have said about general features of this notebook. Let me say that MY next notebook will be a macbook. There were no compatibility problems that I previously expected to run into. This is a Mac that can run any and all 32 & 64-bit Intel-compatible operating systems. Note - Buy with the minimum RAM, and get the remainder from a vendor that specializes in memory and make sure that it is tested & certified for this notebook. You'll come out ahead by buying a pair of the 3rd-party memory sticks and throwing the apple one away rather than upgrading the Apple memory.
