My wife had decided to give me a macbook, and even though I had seen a video of the making of the aluminum body Macbooks my son was telling me that the macbooks that have a white plastic body would be sufficient for me. Since he was a Computer Tech during his twenties(he is now mid 30s) I usually rely on his tech advice. However, when we went to the store that we usualy buy from they first thought they had one with a white plastic body left (they are about $999). But when he went to check he found it had already been sold.
So, since I had already been impressed with the aluminum body laptops, I decided to get a Macbook Pro, as it had a bigger screen and it would be easier for me to see better at age 61. They had a lot of free gifts if you also bought I think 3 year policy on it to cover any repairs necessary so I got that too.
My son had installed a partition in my dell laptop and had put xp on one partition and ubuntu on the other since one doesn't usually get viruses or other problems with Ubuntu. So I could primarily use Ubuntu when I was traveling the internet in my bedroom on my laptop or traveling the 50 U.S. states.(I don't take a laptop to Europe because often people's laptops are confiscated and almost never returned while traveling into or out of the European Union. My son suggested only taking a netbook into Europe so one couldn't lose a hard drive with a lot of personal information on it. A netbook only travels the internet and is a dead terminal so it doesn't have a hard drive.
Anyway, to make a long story short I haven't had a laptop for about 3 months and if my daughter is home from school(she is 13) I cannot use hers. With my Dell I had grown used to moving throughout the house using wifi or even sitting outside on the redwood deck in the back yard in the sun and writing if I could still see the screen in the sun or overcast day or night.
My son thought the Dell was dead at first until he turned the Dell hard drive into a slave of his PC and reformatted it. By doing this he found he could save my Dell. However, by this time, my wife and I had already to get me another laptop. Another thing he did that was really amazing was to install a 1.5 terrabyte hard drive in my Imac duo core pentium(It had only 150 gigabytes before and we had run out of memory by putting 3000 photos from France we took in October this year. So I first bought an external hard drive to put the photos on. Then, the same day we bought the Macbook pro we got a 1.5 terrabyte hard drive for the Imac duo core Pentium which is a ten fold increase in memory. However, he was amazed he was successful in installing the 1.5 terrabyte hard drive because on this one you have to go in through the led screen so it tested his abilities to the limit. So if you aren't already a master tech on Macs I wouldn't advise trying to duplicate what my son did. Though he was successful he was sweating bullets at the end wondering if the Imac would ever restart and reload. Because it is tricky loading the software too. Unlike a PC you have to tell it first to "erase" the new hard drive which is called "Format" in a PC situation. LIke I said he was very amazed to be successful but said it took him to the edge and wouldn't attempt something like this again.
As an American living in Europe, I travel back and forth quite a lot. In the 5 years I have been doing this, I have never heard of anyone getting a laptop confiscated...ever. I usually travel with one or two laptops, plus other stuff. The only time I can imagine one getting taken is if you take porn into Saudi Arabia or somewhere similar, but not Europe.
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