I am a mother of 4 small children and wanting to make the switch from PC to Mac. Currently, our computers serve our family as means of communication, education and photography storage/editing/sharing. What kind of Mac would be best for our needs? Where can we get a great deal?

Try the Apple Store itself. Go to apple.com/store and scroll down to the bottom and click refurbished Mac. They normally have pretty good deals.

With 4 small children, however, I would NOT suggest a Macbook. I would go for an iMac. For about the same price, you can get a much bigger screen, bigger hard drive, bigger everything for the most part. Putting a laptop in the hands of small children (4 of them at that) doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

I am looking to switch from an HP laptop to potentially a mac. I saw on apples website that i can get a refurbished 13" Aluminum Macbook Pro for $899 and a three year applecare plan for $250. Together thats just about equal to a new 13" aluminum macbook pro. Is it worth getting a refurb with the warranty or starting with a new macbook and only the one year?

Get the refurbished one. Apple does an extraordinary job of refurbishing their products. Also, get the AppleCare either way. AppleCare is free on all Apple products for a year, and you can buy it anytime before that year is up. So, even though I STRONGLY recommend AppleCare, give the year a test and see how it goes. AppleCare has been extremely helpful for me. I brought my MacBook Pro in to get a tiny bubble in my display checked out and they ended up replacing my display. The repair total was around $800, which I didn’t pay a cent for because of AppleCare. (oh and I bought my MacBook Pro new, and the bubble was still there) In summary, buy the refurbished one, and buy AppleCare! Oh, and if you are a student, there is a HUGE discount on AppleCare. Also, AppleCare will NOT cover any damage cause by you. (just a warning)

The pc that is supposed to use the printer wireless won’t connect to my printer. When it searches for printers in a network it comes up with the pc name of the computer that is plugged into the printer. Isn’t it supposed to come up with the name of the printer?

Try installing drivers on both computers.

I’m in high school and I need something I can load 40 GB of music on and around 20 GB of pictures and still have a smooth reliable computer to do schoolwork and have streaming video.
So what’s the best laptop out there for under or around $1,000?

Also, I’m not a huge fan of Macs, so would Vista work for me?

I wouldn’t recommend taking anything to school that had 20gb of pictures on it–you’d be a prime target for theft, and you don’t want your private pictures falling in the wrong hands.

Anyhow, I would recommend something like the ASUS 1000H–it’s a tiny 10.2" laptop with a nearly full-size keyboard, and will last 7 hours per charge. It also comes with a 160gb hard drive, and retails for less than $500

My laptop is 2 years old, and it has the touchpad in the middle, and so did all the other laptops we were looking at, at the time. Now all the laptops I see have the touchpad moved to the left. Why is that?

because if you put your palms on the palmrest of your laptop, like you are ready to type, you will find that if you rotae your right hand counterclockwise on the ball of your hand (meat of the thumb), your fingers don’t sweep over the middle. They sweep more to the left side of center. This is why most new laptops have off center, to the left, touchpads.

it is more ergonomic.

Ive looked at lots of websites on google saying that the are cheap (not) and my dad says that he wont spend more than £250 on a laptop for me. BUT I REALLY WANT ONE!!!

Asda had some in and they were selling the at £200 but i think that they are limited stock. Have a look on line. =)

So I need a laptop under atleast $700 but in a different colour other than silver or black (preferably blue,red or white). Does that exist? Where can I get it? Even thoug tis cheap it can’t like fall apart or not work or something. Should I wait until boxing day ? I’m so confuzzled.

wal mart

i’ve tried updating codecs (i’ve got CCCP) and not running any other programmes than the player but it still goes out of sync, i’ve tried media player, zoom player and nero showtime but get the same problem every time any ideas?

Install DivX7 from www.divx.com, before closing the installation check the box to associate mkv files with DivX. You can also try installing the latest Xvid codec from www.xvid.org. Finally you can try updating your AC3 Filter/codec which can be done through either Microsofts Media player website or by typing ac3 filter into a search engine and this will direct you to the AC3 filter website.
Some older versions of Nero do not support MKV or Hd files very well. Also CCCP does seem to have audio sync problems with some high quality video files.
Hope this helps.

If someone had a refurbished phone they never used (meaning they never sent their "broken" phone back because it started working again), can they give it to someone else without any problems with Verizon?

Not a smart thing to do. You are required to send that broken phone back. If you do not send it back, you will be charged the full retail price on your bill. If you sell the phone on e-bay, make sure its the price of full retail($150 - $699).

Most people if they wanted the phone for that much would go to the store to get a brand new phone.

I’m buying a laptop now. I’m not sure if i should go with a Mac or a standard notebooks. I like the Mac video editing features and the photobooth stuff and how it is not as prone to viruses as other laptops. I need one with a lot of memory, the standard applications like a writing application etc., and something that I can download applications easily on. But are Macs really hard to use? Are applications more geared towards pcs than Macs?
thanks in advance.

It sounds like the photobooth thing may make a macbook a lock, though I;d check other windows laptops first since baseline macs can be expensive, and adding more memory (RAM) can jack the price up even more.

As for other uses, downloading and applications should be as easy on a Mac as they are on a PC. I don;t often use macs, but from my little experience, they have a pretty intuitive interface. I picked up a 10 yer old powerbook g3 a year back and found it pretty easy to find my way around. I was even able to hook it up to my DSL internet connection (though running pre-OSX, it wasn’t a very modern surf)

"Are applications more geared towards PCs than Macs?"
That would depend on the applications - if you have any in mind, you should ask friends with Macs how well those applications run on "bootcamp".

There will always be a better notebook out there. Though the newly released macbooks easily sit at the top, don’t imagine that manufacturers of windows notebooks are going to cede the market for premium portability.