Apple Mac OS X and EFI Live

[ScarabEpic22]

If you want an in-car tuning laptop, a netbook is probably a good idea. Good battery life, usually dont run very hot, small form factor (screen size is the downfall). Im a big fan of Asus, only run their motherboards in all my custom desktop builds and have only had 1 fail in ~10 builds, and that was back when there was a huge scandal over a 3rd party vendor supplying inferiod capacitors. 6mo out of warranty, Asus sent me a brand new mobo, I paid to ship it there and thats it. The eeePc's are great, I think you can get them up to 13" now too. Small screen for tuning, but I usually only make small changes on the fly and do most of the work at my desk (if I can help it).

[NateD4]

Not sure how EFI Live impacts battery usage but my 3 year old MacBook Pro runs at least 2 hours on a charge in Windows 7. That was with a battery that exceeded its cycle count. With the new Battery I'm getting about 3.5-4 hours from it. The new MacBooks are way better for battery. Personally I'd never buy a non MacBook for a laptop. Its bad enough the boot camp drivers for the trackpad do not perfectly match the feel of the OS X ones. Then again who needs windows at all?

[joecar]

The majority of my apps run on Windows and have not been ported to OSX...

[68problemchild]

I have a newer Macbook pro and have been using it to tune with Parallels. It works fine. No issues at all.

Power consumption has never been an issue for me. Mine runs all day on a single charge however, I have not paid attention to whether it has a different draw running windows. Intuitively, this would seem unlikely.

I also run the Apple versions of Word, Excel, Outlook. They work great.

Also its not crashing with a virus daily like my Windows was. With a day and half rebuild each time Windows went out the $1000 mac was the best money I ever spent. Flawless operation since day one.

[ScarabEpic22]

Honestly if you are having virus/malware issues now in Windows, you're not running a basic antivirus. Microsoft's FREE Security Essentials is extremely good, better than some paid antivirus/antimalware solutions actually. Ive gotten maybe 2-3 virus/malware infected files in 4 or 5 years now, and all of them were from sketchy torrents and all were automatically discovered by AVG (what I usually use, been using/testing Security Essentials for a while now). I understand everyone's pain with viruses as I work in IT, but honestly its dead simple to install a free program that runs in the background and updates itself automatically.

Fun fact, did you know OS X is actually the LEAST secure OS on the market today? Problem is, no one writes viruses for it because it has such a small market share compared to Windows. Here's one I found quickly on Google, there are a ton more: OSX Security

If you havent run Windows 7, it is a HUGE upgrade from XP (since most people skipped Vista). Just tested my new HP dv7t quad laptop on friday for battery life, with a 9 cell I got about 6.5-7 hours with wifi on and listening to pandora the whole time. And thats with a 17.3" screen, Core i7-2720QM, 8gb ram, 750gb hdd, and Radeon HD 6770M (using integrated Intel HD graphics on battery though). Think a SSD is in my very near future.