Your Apple Laptop - Attn: Jack

[BLINGMW]

For you Apple users - are those services dis-ablebleble? I'm sure there are quite a few pieces on there I just don't care about.

Sure, but with the cost of RAM I've not spent much time bothering with it. I guess I've become rather lazy with my computing, gone are the days of picking out extensions one by one, having different boot sequences, it's all just too fast and cheap. But you can disable services either directly through the unix terminal (I don't know enough about it), or there are utilities out there to help you with it. I used the popular TinkerTool on this laptop to simplify some graphical stuff and get this 800mhz G4 to keep up a bit better. But there's no point on the Intel ones IMO, the interface is very snappy, and boot times are sub 15 sec.

FWIW, for my 2ghz iMac, doing similar things to what you describe, it doesn't come close to using its 1 gig of RAM when running as a PC or Mac, and I have done a little photoshop while running other things without issue. And this laptop has 640MB which has brought it's paging to disk to a pretty low level. However, I don't do any serious "photography stuff", so if you plan on working with multiple 50MB+ images at the same time, maybe you'll need more than 1gig.

EDIT: $1650 to $800 with 2gb ram
-$100 for apple student discount
-$? for ebaying Nano

-$200 for just sticking with white.

And what's better about the HP's display? You mean that it's bigger? Otherwise I'd be surprised as Apple uses excellent displays. Not like the absolute shite display on my Dell at work, holy crap. But I haven't used an HP in a while.