That's just the thing, I don't really want to pay anything for it, given the amount of use I'll get out of it. That's not Apple's fault, but if there's free software out there as an alternative, I'll use it.

I'm going to wait for OpenOffice to release its Mac version. Frankly, I got along fine for a few years without needing an office suite at all (and some of those were during college). I would just use whatever free word processor was popular at the time and call it a day. Lately for the very limited times I still need an office suite, OpenOffice is far more than I need.

*edit*
I was going to mention a third option, which was to find a friend or family member with a student email address, and spend $59 on Office 2007 Ultimate. Unfortunately that offer has ended. Shoot.

Is there a reason you don't just download NeoOffice?

Because I don't have a Mac just yet, and they might have Openoffice by the time I do. I'll give that one a try, though, if it can read files made in Openoffice.

I don't want to make too big a deal out of most of these points, though. The fact is I want a Mac, I'm going to run Windows on it for a few things, and I know that I'm going to love it. The only things in my way now are lack of support for my disc printers (small issue), and money (huge issue)

VMware Fusion seems to have the ability to connect USB printers to the VM. I guess you could do it that way?

Yea, I forgot about that small detail!

NeoOffice is basically OpenOffice. Same thing in essence. I don't know the 'politics' of it but for some reason there is some bickering among the developers that started with the decision for OpenOffice to make a OSX version rather than just let NeoOffice continue to be the sole port of it.

I believe they already have.

Cheers

Well, it requires that you run it under X11. It works, but it's just not very Mac-y. NeoOffice just works better. And yeah, it did used to be a dog, but I've had no problems in recent years.

Pixelmator looks nice, but given that I do about 30 minutes of photo editing work every month, at most, $60 is just too much. I'm not saying it's not worth it; I'm just saying it's not worth it to me.

Others I have run across (but have yet to try) are Acorn, Iris, Pixen, Seashore, Naked Light, Chocoflop.

I've used Seashore, and it's not worth the price ($0). It's like using the GIMP without having any real features.

OK...a former co-worker of mine has a MacBook Pro he is selling. It is 2.2 ghz, 120gb hard drive, 2 gb ram. It is about a year old and in good condition. He wants $1250 for it. Is that a good price?

There are similar machines in past ebay auctions that went for more.

The apple store is down, but you should be able to pick up a refurbished MBP for not much more than that. I've never heard a single complaint about Apple refurbs, and they sell a lot of them.

It's not an inherently bad deal though, the last revision of macbook pros (penryn) were generally considered to perform about the same as the previous revision (santa rosa). Penryn has been around for ~190 days, which is about average. You'd be missing out on a graphics card update, and maybe some battery life.

Complaint time. Out of two MacBook refurbs I know of, both had issues. The one I bought for my wife had to be returned for a replacement keyboard. Apple didn't cover my shipping costs whatsoever even though the machine arrived like that and the problem was phoned into their technical support within 10 minutes of me siging the waybill. The closest service center is a six hour drive from here.

The second one belongs to my sister-in-law and has trouble with the screen. It flashes between bright and dim (ie brightness level when plugged in and brightness level when on battery) at random times. Sometime it will do it for a few seconds, other times it will do it for a few minutes.

She also had a Refurb 2nd gen Nano that would repeatedly lock up.

Rene

"Refurb" used to mean "refurbished", as in polished up and cleaned, consumables replaced, bearings/hinges lubed or replaced, etc..

Now it simply means "used", or "rejected by first owner". Often for a good reason, but sometimes just on a whim.

Cheers

Ok...now i have a dilemma. I was all set to buy a used MacBook pro (2.2ghz 120gb ram 15" screen) from a former co-worker of mine for about $1250 (he bought his in Nov. 2007) before they came out with the new MacBook Pros. Then when they did come out with the new ones, the prices dropped greatly and I told him this and got him to drop it down to $1000. However, now at my work i can order a newer version (has multi-touch 2.4 200gb hard drive - but not the ones that just came out recently - for $1299 (plus tax.) Which do you think I should get? I have the $1000 saved up, but wasn't sure if it was worth it to pay a few hundred bucks for a bigger hard drive. However, it would be a brand new battery on that one.....what would you recommend?

Save up and buy the new one. You'll get a warranty, new battery and bigger HD.

Just to notify folks, it looks like uTorrent is available for Mac now. Great news! This program is just fantastic.

Actually i use utorrent on windows and http://www.transmissionbt.com/ on mac, and i like transmission so much that i would like a version of it for windows.

Picasa for the Mac.

I'll give it a shot when I get back from vacation to see if it has anything to pull me away from iPhoto.

Sweet.

I think the best thing about Picasa for windows is the screen saver. I can add anyone's web albums to it and it will show their photos in the screen saver slide show. I have my friends added to it so I can see all the new photos they add to their web albums. I also really like the picasa web albums. I pretty much just use Picasa to upload stuff and fix red eye.

Been running Picasa/Mac for a while now. It scanned my whole library quickly. I got it to crash by randomly clicking on things while it was importing, but it's been generally quite stable.

It recognized the Picasa.ini files laying around from before I switched to a Mac and did the right thing, although it apparently writes out new metadata as ".picasa.ini" (note the leading period) which means it's slightly annoying to go back and forth from a PC to a Mac using the same filesystem.

About the only annoyance is that it doesn't know exactly what to do with the "Originals" subdirectory made by Picasa/Win to save originals when you make some changes like red-eye reduction. Picasa/Mac just shows you the Originals directory. It doesn't figure out that it shouldn't show that.

Picasa Mac installed a GoogleUpdater service without (apparently) telling me about it.

Bad form, Google.

And when I put iTunes on my PC, it installed an Apple updater service without telling me about it. What's your point?

That's Apple conforming to the status-quo of Windows software installs. Mac software installs aren't supposed to put crap all over your drive and hidden items unless it's Adobe's software.

Seems like iPhoto 09 gives a new reason to try iPhoto again. If they've managed to get rid of everything that sucked about iPhoto previously (essentially everything that was in the whole program) they might have a winner. To be fair, what sucked the most was the management aspects. Which seems to be what Picasa seems to handle better.

I'll be giving it a quick look to see if it adds any benefits for me. I'm already using Lightroom as my primary management app.

One of the many problems with iPhoto is that it doesn't scan folders for new pictures and have it automatically add it to iPhoto. I have been trying to find a plug-in that someone might have made that would do that, but I have had no luck finding one.

Picasa does this quite well. Under Tools -> Folder Manager, you can tell it where to look, and it's actually pretty good about picking up on new images within seconds of their being written. Picasa tries to pay attention to your load average, so it will (sometimes) delay scanning new pictures if your computer is busy doing something else.

sorry...had Picasa on the brain...i actually meant iPhoto doesn't scan new photos....