[Brilliant Ken]

Hi from a newbie! As I am contemplating to purchase an Apple Laptop, I would really appreciate some advice. Firstly, does Apple laptops support XP OS and MS Office? Can document files created with the Apple be used interchangably with other computers and laptops with no compability issues? Can my current external hard disk drive, formatted in the NTFS file system with XP, operate smoothly on an Apple Laptop?
Thank you.

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I can not answer all of your questions, but you might want to look at OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) since it provides a nice office package and is free. I have heard that some version of M$ Office will use a closed document file format, so your documents will be able to only be read by other M$ Office users. OpenOffice can read and write the current Word documents, although sometimes the formatting is a bit off.

Macs would not really support XP. I am not sure if they understand the NTFS filesystem, but I would think so. Many versions of Linux can read NTFS partitions. Some can not write, but you can find updates to allow for writing.

[Kemasa]

I can not answer all of your questions, but you might want to look at OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) since it provides a nice office package and is free. I have heard that some version of M$ Office will use a closed document file format, so your documents will be able to only be read by other M$ Office users. OpenOffice can read and write the current Word documents, although sometimes the formatting is a bit off.

Macs would not really support XP. I am not sure if they understand the NTFS filesystem, but I would think so. Many versions of Linux can read NTFS partitions. Some can not write, but you can find updates to allow for writing.

[warriorscot]

As far as i know it wont because the hardware is differnt from standard x86 stuff, they only recently released an apple OS that could work on normal PCs(not a clue why you would want that mind you) but as far as i know it doesnt work the other way.

If you have XP on the external drive it wont boot the laptop from it because it wont have the hardware drivers for that system just the ones it was installed on.

Fairly sure NTFS is supported but i would google that im sure its easy info to find out.

[aldaros23]

you can get microsoft office for MAC OPERATING SYSTEM (X10.4)

also, you can change to XP operating system on a mac and then install microsoft office - they are both available

the hard drive, not sure.

[Thebinaryman]

you can also use virtualpc to run windows on top of osx, but i dont know why you would want to.

ibook, and powerbook models (g3, g4) cannot run windows xp (they are not x86 based).
the new macbookpro ones with intel processors CAN.

i dont think the disk will work, but if you wouldnt mind formatting it, you could format it as fat or fat32 so it would work on both mac + pc, but you would be limiting the maximum file size to 2gb.

yeah, you can get all kinds of software (ms office for mac, apple works, openoffice, etc.) to read/write ms office files. so you dont have to worry about file compatability. but i would stick with open document formats.