Buy a desktop or a laptop?

[wishonastar]

My desktop is on the way out but I cant decide whether to buy an imac to replace it or a laptop.

Some days I think Id be better with a laptop so I could move around with it but other times I worry that the screen is too small

[uscwest]

I don't know how big the screen is on your desk top but they make some laptops today that have HUGE screens. My DW had to buy a special case just to wheel her laptop around.

[catrancher]

I've got a Macbook Pro with a 17" screen on it and I love it. I watch movies on it, everything.

As I tell everyone, you can have my Macbook Pro when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.

Yeah, I'm a fan.

Tom (... gonna upgrade one of these days!)

[foreverducky]

I'd go for the laptop. As mentioned above, some of the screens for the laptops now-a-days are huge!

[JStrickPhoto]

The only reason I would recommend desktop is if you:

* are a photographer
* do video work

If you are a photographer, you would PROBABLY be OK with the latest laptop, be it Mac Pro or Win 7 machine. But, if you constantly shoot a lot and need the power to post-process images via Photoshop CS5, a desktop typically has more memory capacity and storage capacity. Yes, you can connect external disks for storage but you cannot install more memory, in all cases.

A Mac Pro desktop can easily accommodate up to 32GB ram with 12 cores of processor power! A laptop cannot presently offer that much.

That being said, a laptop with an SSD (solid-state drive) would be phenomenal. No drive seek latency and lower power consumption with moving parts... These laptops have exceptional battery live and drive access is lightning fast!

Also, if you make your own DVDs from home video or for other reasons, you truly will want the horsepower that only come from a desktop computer. Rendering video can take several hours, if you've never done this before.

It took me a summer a few years ago to transfer all my Hi8 and MiniDV home videos to DVD!

Just a few things to consider...

Jamie

[ukwdwnut]

id go with what jamie said above. desktops have huge hard drives for storage od photos and you need a lot of that for videos if your into editing

laptops for this reason and what jamie said cant handle large amounts of ram and remember you need a 64bit operating system to use more than 4gb. ive got both but i always do video editing on my desktop.

if none of the above is what its going to be used for then it really depends if you want to be mobile with your computing. remember even on a 17" laptop screen can still hurt your eyes if used hours on end and all the time whereas a big screen on a desktop wouldnt, it doesnt me anyway

[catrancher]

remember even on a 17" laptop screen can still hurt your eyes if used hours on end and all the time whereas a big screen on a desktop wouldnt

Neither my Macbook Pro laptop (17") nor my work Windows laptop (15") hurts my eyes. And they both get used about 10 hours a day or more.

Tom (... tough eyes!)

[ukwdwnut]

Neither my Macbook Pro laptop (17") nor my work Windows laptop (15") hurts my eyes. And they both get used about 10 hours a day or more.

Tom (... tough eyes!)

it really depends on your eyesight tom doesnt it

[JStrickPhoto]

I have a pair of 21" LCD widescreen displays on my Mac G5. That seems to be pretty optimal for my eyes. I'm hoping to upgrade soon to a new dual quad-core Mac Pro desktop. Probably upgrade to 24" displays at the same time.

Mainly upgrading as I cannot run the latest Photoshop CS5/Adobe CameraRaw on the PowerPC chipset.

I bought a nice HP laptop for my wife for her birthday a couple years ago. a 17" widescreen display is about as small as I'd want to go - just to be able to drill into pixel-by-pixel while editing photos. The 15" displays in widescreen format are really small!

[uscwest]

Mick, removable hard drives will plug into a laptop just as easily as a desk top. And these days they have 1 Terrabyte drives that are not much bigger, if that, than a deck of cards.