catastrophic failure

My main computer tower's motherboard got fried recently and as such I'm out a tower. I figure this is as good a time as any to start reviewing all the new toys I've gotten to upgrade an old tower until I decide to commit to buildling a new intel i7 tower. I'll put up reviews of some of the new electronics and parts I've gotten:

1) WD's 1TB Caviar Black Harddrive.
-while the new rage is green tech that saves on power and noise, I decided to put a caviar black in there as its a little bit faster and currently I'm not too concerned with the power difference. If I ever raid a few 1tb's together i may consider it, but considering how bad software raid is sometimes i've decided just to throw in one for now.

2) WD My Book 2TB Mirrored. This has just been ordered as 1TB of data is a good amount and it seems like a good idea to have it be mirrored especially on an external harddrive. WD has two green caviars in there and supposedly its very simple to use. Updates on how it is when it gets here in a few days.

3)Macbook Pro
Ok, ok I caved. I got an apple machine. I started out in my youth as a mac kid but upon getting my very own computer for the first time senior year of high school, I got a Dell and switched to Windows. Looking back, it was a good time to get away from Apple as that's when they started doing too much with their OS and machine models. I have nothing against Windows and the PC market but I am very much a child of marketing. Having used an iPod and iPhone for a while now I decided to get a macbook as my first laptop. The fact that it can run both Windows XP and OSX was key factor.

Asthetcially the laptop is stylish and pretty and the unibody aluminum build is quite nice. Its also very easy to access the harddrive and battery with a single latch. Upgrading the ram is a little more difficult as it involves a few screws but is a snap overall as well. Newegg was selling Macbook Pros for 1899 with free shipping and they still don't tax mail order shipments so it was quite the deal. 4gb of ram ran me about 79.99 and a 500gb wd blue series sata notebook drive was 99.99. Doing a self upgrade is significantly cheaper than getting a macbook pro with those specs from apple.

Why Pro and not just the standard macbook? I don't really use firewire but I do appreciate the nicer screen resolution and the much better viewing angle. The macbook's screen viewing angle is not nearly as good. The Macbook Pro also has slightly better speakers and a better graphics card. That only matters as I would like to sometimes use it as a desktop replacement if I'm ever traveling or away from my tower. For a typical user who doesn't care about all of that the Macbook is significantly cheaper at 1299.

Windows XP SP3 loaded without problems the second time I installed it. For some reason the trackpad didn't work in XP the first time. I still have no idea why that happened and why I couldn't get it to work.

Cons: Apple now uses a mini Display port for video out instead of VGA, DVI, or HDMI out. Mini Display port is still fairly uncommon and adapaters are required if you want to connect the macbook to an HDTV, monitor or projector. The adapaters are also fairly pricy, about 29.99 from apple for a DVI or VGA cable. If you go to monoprice.com you can get an HDMI adapter but since minidisplay port doesn't output sound, you still need to run a seperate audio cable out from the laptop.

Lastly just a headsup for anyone hoping to upgrade the harddrive in their macbook. You will need a torx 6 screwdriver. Apple uses torx 6 mounting screws to secure the harddrive. Just remove them from the harddrive that came with your laptop and put them onto the replacement drive. Torx 6 is surprisingly small so check your toolkit to see if you have it.