Chloe's Xmas present...

My daughter Chloe's been a good girl this year. She got into the only prep school for the Paris and Brussels schools of Cinema, and is doing well there. So she deserves a nice Xmas present this year. And it just so happens that the old dinosaur of a computer that she has (my old desktop from 2000) is not able to do any video editing (too slooooow), and it's about time she had a laptop, no? In the US she'd be a sophomore in college. But there's a catch! The pros on the heavy-duty work stations use Final Cut Pro for the editing... and there is no PC version of this software, only Mac. Which is MUCH more expensive. If she needs to be able to use professional cameras, and not just good old DV, we're talking at least 1GHZ G4 with 1GB of RAM. New : 2-3 keuro, with an external HD, depending on size-of-screen. Adobe premiere on a laptop PC that only supports DV might cost 1 keuro. Ugh... So i checked ebay.fr, and found some year-old Powerbook for sale, slower than new, but fast enough, and also cheaper. I asked her to check out what she can expect to use it with/for, because if we're talking a light 12" iBook with only 512MB of RAM, it's less of an extravagance. Not so much for the money, cuz her grandparents will help out, but just the principle of the thing. That's a lot of money to spend on a laptop for an 18-year old! Location : Beauvais, France