[mikey8270]

So I'm going to college next year, and I want to get a 15" PowerBook to take with me. The only question I have left is which one? With the education discount, I can get the 1.5ghz and add a SuperDrive for $1934, or I can get the 1.67ghz with a SuperDrive and 128mb vram for $2189.

I already bought 1 gig of ram to put in it, so I'd probably spend the $255 I'd save by getting the 1.5ghz on a nice external hard drive and case. Are there any real advantages that I would get from the extra .17ghz and doubling the vram? (I do some very occasional work in photoshop and FCP, and I might be getting an external 20" widescreen lcd at some point in the future).

Also, what are the advantages/disadvantages of the internal SuperDrive vs an external dvd burner? I've read that some people are having problems with burn speed on the internal drives. Should I spend the money now and get it internal or wait until I need it (I don't see myself realy needing to burn any dvds in the near future) and then get an external drive.

I hope you can guys can help me get this all sorted out.

Thanks,
mikey

[tbd]

I just bought a mac earlier this week (I am a sophomore in college--prior laptop had too many issues). I went with the 1.5ghz, no superdrive 15". I personally do not think the extra .17 ghz will make a difference, nor will the 128mb vid card (unless you're into games...but wait those dont play on a mac...). The mac is a great purchase in my opinion. It wont play games, but it does everything else just as well and does some stuff better (like programming, 'cos of the unix shell...excep no ia386 assembly language...). I love my mac so far, and I have no complaints about the speed of the 1.5 and I usually have a fair amount of stuff open (safari, mail, itunes, some X11 windows, etc) AND I only have 512 ram at the moment. So with a gig of ram you would be fine. I have friend in the CS department with 1.25/1.33 ghz powerbooks and they dont complain about the speed. If I were you I would save the extra money, you'll find other uses for it at college.

[wuzup101]

I'm currently finishing up my sophomore year in engineering and the sciences... bought a 1.5ghz w/o superdrive model (but with the 128vram) in the beginning of this school year. The powerbook has served me well and is plenty fast. I would personally say that if you don't think there's any reason to get the extra vram then don't go for the faster book. I always run a dual monitor setup and like to play games (espeically WoW). The extra vram is very nice for things like that + photoshop and such. That, and they are more sought after when you're reselling the machine, and on top of that they are more future proof. I'd hate to say $250 isn't much, but in reality when you're aleady spending so much on a new computer, it's what and extra week of work for us students? 2 or 3 days if you have a nice internship