I'm getting a big tax refund in 6-8 weeks and i'm planning to use a part of it to buy myself an Ibook G4 12" laptop to replace my entire desktop setup. But before i fully replace my windows xp machine i need to know if there are mac alternatives for all the software i'm currently using. I need alternatives for: ICQ & MSN Nero burning rom ACDSee browser Mirc P2P software Emulators for nes,snes and sega genesis software for viewing DIvx/X-vid/mpeg/realplayer movies and series Also one final question, can i still watch all my movies and shows that i burned on DVD under windows ? Because last time i used a mac (years ago) it was very dificult to read NTFS/FAT32 on a Mac.
http://www.trillian.cc/ http://www.global-im.com/ http://www.jabber.org/ http://www.jabbernet.dk/ http://www.messenger2.com/ http://www.miranda-im.org/ http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ http://www.zango.com/ these are alternatives to icq and msn.
Microsoft have done a version of MSN for mac. Apparently the Nero alternative is toast titanium. mIRC I guess use Mozilla Chatzilla divx use the divx player on divx.com wmv use mac version of windows media player 9 mpeg use quicktime I wouldnt go for a notebook though to replace a desktop machine. My mac mini has a bit more grunt than that and it struggles to do 8 players on Battlefield 1942 demo. For that kinda money you may aswell get a 1.42ghz mac mini or an eMac and get a mac for the same price with more grunt. I'm semi-regretting my Mac purchase - it is a lot better for my business which is the primary reason why I got it, but it kinda sucks for games and Mac ports of windows titles dont run too well thanks to the shitty gfx card and they're twice as expensive. If you just want a newer faster machine than your current PC I suggest you build yourself a new PC - easily done for something with reasonable grunt for the price of a weakass 12" mac laptop.
Thanks for the links wolverine Legit, i don't play any games on my pc, the only thing i played for years was countersttrike. So i'm not worried about game performance i just want a nice 12" mac that i can take with me easily and doesn't take up much room. A G4 ibook has more then ennough grunt for the things i want to do with it which is basicly, chatting,browsing,downloading shit and watching tv shows and movies. I just want to be sure i'll be able to do all the things i do now on my windows pc.
Reading DVDs you burned on your PC on a Mac shouldn't be a problem as they don't use FAT or NTFS or anything like that (only HDDs and floppies/zip disks use them). I assume Macs can read ISO9660/UDF DVDs like anything else...?
Linuxintosh A girl I work with ditched OSX for Linux Mandrake PPC on her iBook primarily because she couldn't find an IRC client that she liked. I'll ask her about any other good alternative apps though. =) ~Krelian
Re: Linuxintosh Basically all the IRC clients on Linux are on OS X as well in addition to a whole bunch of other stuff. Using fink one could install xchat or bitchx or whatever. I personally use Colloquy for IRC, it's a Mac native application and very user friendly. For other chatting like AIM and Yahoo there's also Adium which my boss really likes. iChat is fine also if you only use AIM. For video playing, http://www.videolan.org/ is pretty much the standard and will play just about everything. Go to www.emulation.net to get emulators for the mac, there are several choices for the major systems. OS X can read, write, and format disks in FAT16/32, as well as any ISO9660/UDF CD/DVD. You're asking for trouble trying to deal with NTFS disks on any OS besides Windows (but you could of course browse a Windows box's files via Windows File Sharing in OS X). All in all the 12" iBook is a very good choice for the computing you need to do (I'm typing on one right now!). I'd upgrade the RAM as soon as you can after buying one; an additional 256MB should be enough and can be had cheaply from a third party (never buy RAM from any OEM). Of course, the more you put in the faster it'll run. Update: Oh yeah there's ACDSee for Mac. Also http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ is a valuable resource.[/url]
