vbfan
Sophomore
Posts: 221
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Post by vbfan on Feb 6, 2005 23:21:13 GMT -5
So, what do you all use? I use a PC at both the office and at home, but am seriously thinking about buying a MAC. My sister swears by them and refuses to use a PC.
I am just tired of all the viruses, spywire, machine freezeups, registry problems (believe me its no fun trying to repair registry errors) a constant need to update windows etc, etc.
I just worry about software compatibility issues, although I've heard you can get virtual PC to run virtually any program on a MAC.
Let me know what you think.
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Post by Gorf on Feb 6, 2005 23:30:52 GMT -5
I personally have no use for Apple / Mac machines but Comsumer Reports has them ranked at the top of their reliability and customer satisfaction rankings for both desktop and notebooks for the past few years.
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Post by BonJoeV on Feb 6, 2005 23:37:02 GMT -5
PC!If you use a MAC you're either an educator, graphic artist or some kind of Dorkwad.
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Post by IdahoBoy on Feb 7, 2005 18:03:56 GMT -5
Macs are for computer idiots.
That being said... I'll never ever get one.
There are plenty of things you can do to get around registry problems... I've not had one in 3-4 years.
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Post by warriordudette88 on Feb 7, 2005 19:47:31 GMT -5
I hate Macs. The ones at my school always freeze or end up with unlimited types of errors that require you to restart the computer. I've probably wasted about 5 hours of my life trying to restart and log back in to the Macs I work on in class. It's hell for a yearbook editor. I wish we had PCs at school.
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 8, 2005 20:26:50 GMT -5
I haven't owned an Apple since the 1980s when I had, first, the Apple Lisa (a collector's item now) and, second, the Apple Macintosh 640k (I think that's what it's called). All I did was just draw and paint stuff.
I recently bought the Mac Mini (Apple's latest offering). $499 in a small package. Cool! You need your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but it does a great job with DVD and CD burning. I'm naked in some of my DVDs (Brad Pitt's butt has nothing on me). So, I bought several more as gifts for various relatives. They love it!
It's not that I'm a Windows or Apple guy. I don't care either way. I was just satisfying a curiousity.
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Post by 7thWoman on Feb 9, 2005 15:13:19 GMT -5
When you're in a position where have to support any and every platform your faculty throw at you, you realize that pretty much all OS's these days are essentially the same, and they all suck. There was a time when computers weren't heavily used, software was designed with a little bit of vision toward functionality and future use, OS's were pretty stable, and machines shipped with huge manuals that could help you out of almost any problem you ran into.
Enter the salesmen (and saleswomen). Thanks to them, software is now shipped before it is tested, the only vision involved in the design is how much money will be made in the short term, and we now have billions of people using these products who don't know what they're doing, and millions of people (mostly kids) tyring to get stuff to break because they don't have anything better to do with their time. On top of that we have legal folk struggling to determine how the law fits in to a world they cannot hope to understand. The entire industry has become a clusterf**k.
It doesn't end up mattering which platform you like better, so much as which platform you can get support for when things go south (and they will at some point, no matter what platform you use). I personally don't like the price of Apple products. Other than that, I don't really care whether I'm sitting in front of X Windows, MS Windows, OS X's Aqua, or some sort of command prompt. They all piss me off equally.
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Post by IdahoBoy on Feb 10, 2005 1:32:56 GMT -5
Translation from 7thWoman... I'm still stuck on my college professor's agenda in my first year of on the job work. You'll learn.
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Post by sIsam on Feb 10, 2005 3:01:26 GMT -5
Translation from 7thWoman... I'm still stuck on my college professor's agenda in my first year of on the job work. You'll learn. I am not but I agree with her But then those are the reason we have a job so long live imperfect software and hardware!
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Post by Gorf on Feb 10, 2005 8:09:23 GMT -5
I am not but I agree with her But then those are the reason we have a job so long live imperfect software and hardware! FWIW: 7th ain't a her.
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Post by 7thWoman on Feb 10, 2005 10:44:13 GMT -5
Translation from 7thWoman... I'm still stuck on my college professor's agenda in my first year of on the job work. You'll learn. I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I've been here 7 years. All I was realy trying to say is that every OS sucks.
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Post by IdahoBoy on Feb 10, 2005 13:13:40 GMT -5
What do you think a perfect OS would do?
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Post by 7thWoman on Feb 10, 2005 14:04:48 GMT -5
Basically, it should provide abstract methods for low-level communication with the hardware without crashing. That's pretty much all it needs to do, and it's the one thing that OS's have been failing miserably at ever since this GUI crap got started.
Things the perfect OS should not do include:
-wasting memory or processor resources by making things bounce in a system tray as an application loads
-allow ovbious security holes like password-less admin accounts, and open shares
-advertise support for hardware that doesn't actually work with it (some of the Linux distributions have been terrible about this)
-come bundled with games, email clients, or web browsers by default, which end up causing all sorts of problems with each service pack or "update" that gets installed and breaks the application you were using
-take a freakin' gig or more of space on the hard disk for the base installation.
-require 128 MB RAM minimum (just for an OS!)
-have tripple nested for loops in the source code with comments next to them saying things like "We're not sure what this code does but we're afraid to take it out." (A friend of mine used to work for Sun on their SunOS. His boss had a look through the Windows 95 source code when the courts ordered MS to release it to their competitors. He found this snippet of code and posted it on his door.)
Windows XP SP2, OS X 10.3, and Red Hat 9 are worlds better than their predecessors, but they still do a lot of the stupid crapola they've been doing for the last 10+ years. I think a lot of it is because they're trying to market it as being "easy." It's the old "We think, so you don't have to" approach, and it never works. But it does make money.
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Post by BearClause on Feb 10, 2005 16:18:34 GMT -5
I use both. Prefer the Mac (running 10.3) for ease of use and elegance of design, but it's only a older G3 iBook before the updated models at lower prices. Different updates seem result in the occasional freeze up (esp waking up from sleep), but that's pretty rare with the latest version (and it could be my older hardware). The coolest thing is that open it up and it's ready in a second. My PC notebook at work whirrs and grinds for 20 seconds, and the aftermarket wireless card takes over a minute to reestablish a connection.
My home PC has a tendency to crash every time I add a new piece of software. OTOH - I primarily use it for storage and I do my best not to run too much stuff on it. I've gotten the "black screen of death" at the most inopportune times too.
I'm thinking of getting a Power Mac G5 with the PC staying in the background for those tasks where I have to have it. I used one for an extended time, and it's a real nice machine.
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Post by IdahoBoy on Feb 11, 2005 1:13:31 GMT -5
I personally think that a majority of computer OS problems stem from the user. You computer "techies" will be safe as long as there are users screwing up the settings and coming to you for help after totally obliterating their systems.
That being said, I prefer the Windows XP interface over all others for: Options available to the user, accessibility, look and feel, and availability of software for the OS.
I dislike the Mac OS because the alternate/option buttons are very difficult to retrieve and I have dealt with way too many conversion issues between Mac and PC that I have a dark-deep passionate hate for the Mac OS (especially it's optional use of extensions!).
Linux/Unix OS's require too much typing and the look and feel is quite bland.
I am anxiously awaiting the release of Longhorn from Microsoft, but I understand that it too, will be a Service Pack OS because of deadlines of releasing it.
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