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Apple have announced the new Macbook line of laptops with the Intel CPU's inside. Eucational prices start at £599 ex VAT and for the money it seems to be a great deal. 1.83Ghz Core Duo, 512MB RAM and 60Gb Hard Drive.
From the Dell website a Latitude 640m sells at £649 with a slower CPU, same memory, same HD, an older GPU, 802.11g and no Bluetooth. Plus the Macbook is loaded with iLife and a whole lot lighter.
The only problem with educational use of these is if everyone's only used to windows, it would just go down very badly if people suddenly had to climatise to mac, especially staff(teachers)!
Chris
Sorry, what I forgot to mention is that with a Windows XP licence this machine will also boot and run windows XP with no problems.
So you have a Mac and a Windows XP laptop...
I've just set up a suite here full of MacMini's that by default boot into Windows XP, it gets used every day and we've had no problems. We have a bigger suite of iMac's upstairs and when that is full teachers and pupils come down to the MacMini room and boot into OS X to carry on work they've already started.
Quite successful for you then?
The other thing is trying to get accross to smt that you can get better laptops cheaper than dells we get through county procurement.
Chris
The base spec (£599 ex VAT) fails to include the extended warranty. You need to add another £141 for the 3 years warranty. (£740)
And after you have added on the XP licence (you cannot use the Select Agreement licence as that is an upgrade ... you need to buy an OEM version ... £78 IIRC from Ramesys) so now you are up to £818.
Still a bargain price machine though for what you get.
I have just put one together to order next week (2 of them) rather than the MacBook Pro I was going for ... £1049 and still cheap if you ask me.
@GD
Oh to be SMT ;)
After spending the last few weeks looking after a new mac suite and servers, I can say that I have come to loath the macs. The administration side is a complete joke. I'm not sure I've found anything that works as described on apples web site yet.
It doesn't help that my macbook pro is dead after only 4 week!
All they seem to do is crash in annoying ways - like loging out and in, obviously a difficult task, often ends up in an eternal spinning ball.
Depending on how you're integrating you're macs you can use Workgroup Manager to apply policies to them. I've looked after couple of rooms full of Macs for 4 years now and just like Windows it doesn't just happen in a day. You need to work on the setup and it will pay off.Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCoy
We're running fairly new hardware, G5 Xserves, G5 iMacs, Intel MacMini's, G4 Powerbooks and intel Macbook Pro's and it all works just fine. First thing to do on a newly delivered Mac is to format and reinstall the OS, get rid of the trial software that ties the machine up. Have you implemented a local Software Update server? Having this usually applies patches before you see bugs.
Being honest ... for those people who struggle with generic OSX Server / workstation setups (which do require a fair bit of work ... especially if you are integrating them into and AD environment) then have a look at 3rd party tools.
I have sworn by MacAdministrator for years (not enough machines here to justify it at the moment) and rarely had to swear at it.
I've not even got as far as integration yet.
Take setting up a print queue for example. Print quotas are broken in various different ways in 10.4.2 to 10.4.5. The print quota does not count pages unless you set the print driver on the server to generic postscript. lpd wouldn't work until I enabled ipp on the server queue for some reason. There is no automated way to deploy print drivers, I spent some time working out that despite copying the ppd and the driver showing up, it didn't actually work until I manually installed the oki driver on each machine.
My hp4200n kept crashing with a service error, turned out to be a print job from osx with a non ascii character making a postscript file that made the printer die in 5 seconds.
The administration tools like to log me out of them every few minutes.
The managed preferences really are *very* limited. Can I do something as simple as set the machines language region with them? No. Can I set any of the preferences from the system panel with them? No. It seems I will have to try and find out the settings for the preference files (plist etc). These additional settings appear to have very little documentation.
Lots of the software doesn't use the proxy settings to autoupdate.
Thankfully I have tiger, so at least I have acls for the file share permissions, its a real pain to manage without - for example I copy some work to a users directory, it retains my permissions - they can see it. Acls are a *new* feature? At least I can set them to be inhereited like my windows user shares.
Oh and how can I make my account able to administer the machines? I have to keep using the local admin account. They don't often wake from sleep with remote admin, and ofthen the remote admin client on the machines stops working.
Why must all the software default to letter *every* time you use it?
Where is the equivalent of roaming profiles? Must users haul huge amounts of crap aroud in their home folders.
Mobile home folders are broken when using background sync (lost loads of work finding this one out).
I'm sure there must have been something that worked without days of swearing and frustration, but I can't think of anything just now :/
Its like going back to NT4, and thats not a good thing :P
I would *seriously* suggest you have a good look at MacAdministrator from Hi-Resolution.
You do swear ( at the price of it )