<p>I have two choices for what to do for my computer situation next year:</p>
<p>1) I have a 2-month old 20" iMac desktop I could bring with me to keep in my dorm. My parents have agreed to buy a sub $1000 laptop in addition.</p>
<p>2) Leave the iMac at home and buy a Macbook Pro for college</p>
<p>Some things my parents are worried about is the safety of the iMac in my dorm and such (although I am rooming with a friend from high school in the honors housing). Any thoughts as to which option would be more efficient/be the smarter choice and why?</p>
<p>Is there a way to secure the iMac? As in with a cable lock?</p>
<p>I'd think that the MacBook Pro would be the easier way to go as you wouldn't have to deal with copying files back and forth between two different operating systems all the time. On the other hand, having two computers provides you with redundancy in case you have any kind of failure on one machine.</p>
<p>bceagle, the cable lock is a great idea, i haven't thought of thought of that before. i will definitely look into that.</p>
<p>I have an external 320GB hard drive (though not portable). Does anyone know if the files on that hard drive would be able to be accessed by both a mac and PC? Or would the hard drive need to be formatted differently for each? </p>
<p>If I wont be able to use the hard drive back and forth between an imac and the laptop then I think I will definitely go for the MacBook pro.</p>
<p>I just hooked up a 160 GB external USB2 drive to my MacBook Pro and both Windows and Mac OSX can see the files on the drive. But the Mac OSX side cannot write to the disk. I think that the disk has to be formatted FAT to be writable on the Mac OSX side.</p>
just hooked up a 160 GB external USB2 drive to my MacBook Pro and both Windows and Mac OSX can see the files on the drive. But the Mac OSX side cannot write to the disk. I think that the disk has to be formatted FAT to be writable on the Mac OSX side.
</p>
<p>Yeah, FAT, or better yet, FAT32 should be writeable on both OSes.</p>
<p>Kensington Locks (that's what they are called) are pretty handy, they prevent simple thefts.
-E.x. One person distracts you/a roomate out of room, second person steals computer
-Somebody breaks into your dorm while you are not there.
-Etc.</p>
<p>Someone <em>could</em> disassemble the computer (most people who steal aren't this smart), or try to break the lock (physical pulling would trash the computer housing and greatly reduce its resale value, attempting to figure out a combo or break a key lock takes time and is more noticeable). It stops most theives- there are easier targets.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I mirror the sentiments of BCEagle, although seeing a friend in college struggle with the need for laptop repairs, I'd say the handiness of the second computer easily outweighs the inconvenience of having to use a thumbdrive/email to work on things).</p>
<p>As long as you have a portable hard drive as large as 320 GB, you could always partition it into two drives if you needed to, one FAT/FAT32, one NTFS, if it turned out that FAT(32) wasn't writeable to both. Partitioning is pretty easy to do, really.</p>