Mac vs PC

[PersonGuyDude]

My basic thoughts on the subject....

If you like using a Macintosh OS, that's fine, their laptops are great, but I get to laugh at you if you buy a mac for double what it would cost to buy a PC and put Lion on it :beer:

(or triple what it would cost to build a custom rig )

 

[James_Lehman]

What about Linux? It can be installed and run very well on either platform.

Either one of them can have Intel as the processor, but only a PC can have an AMD.

And BTW with a virtual machine, you can run any OS within any other. Whoooop Teeee Dooooo!

 

[Bionic-Badger]

I'm just happy that what OS you use is usually more about personal preference than hardware capabilities now. Now you can select an OS based on your needs, and essentially run it on anything you can buy with a little work.

I prefer to use Windows on the desktop, but use Linux in VMs and on servers--the latter is my preferred use of Linux. I don't use Macs much, but they do have some fantastic GUI features (like their multi-column file selection dialog) that I wish were on Windows. At the same time, it just feels too slow moving between tasks on OSX, and I like my taskbar.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

The way I always do it on my personal machines is to install the OS and all software like office software, media creation/manipulation software, day to day life management stuff etc. on one partition or drive, and all games, movies, songs, and anything else that hogs hdd space on another drive/partition. Then I make an image of the OS partition as it sits fully configured and store it on an external hdd and just back up the data storage partition, also to an external drive. If your internal drive(s) are big enough to hold the OS partition image you should keep a copy of it there so you have 2 copies of it also. Most image creation software will only include the portion of the drive that contains data and ignore free space.

This way all I need is about 15 minutes tp back up personal data and reimage and I'm back up. I might have to install a few more programs and do a tiny bit of configuration but it gets me 95% of the way there.

Very smart approach. I was planning to do that, but installed a cracked version of windows 7... on the system where this happened. I didn't want to commit after my BAD experiences with vista... if 7 was as bad I would have switched back to XP. Of course this was a quite a while back.

After installing, it ran fine, and passed all tests I could come up with, so I never switched over to a more "legitimate" non test version

So now I'm on the hunt for two Win 7 Pro, x64 disks. One for my home computer, and one for the work computer that crashed.

Depending on what I find, I might actually just reinstall the "test" verison on the work computer, keep it for media playback, and just build a new one for work. Haven't made up my mind just yet. All I know is I miss having two 27" monitors, and I feel bad for all of you guys on tiny monitors... yes they work, but what a PITA

Sorry for the OT, but what's the general consensus on trying out software, or products, prior to buying?

 

[James_Lehman]

I think the most important distinction between OSs is the fact that Windows is the only one left still in use that is truly a personal computer OS. That's NOT a good thing!

Linux, Mac OSX, BSD, and just about anything else is POSIX. That means that it is a fully capable main frame OS. It has true multi-tasking and multi-user stuff built into the kernel and a file system that provides ownership and permissions for owner, group and everyone else.

Way back in the day, MS came out with OS/2. A bit after the development started on that, IBM bought it. About 85% or more of the core technology that went into OS/2 was created by MS. After IBM bought it, they still kept a development contract with MS and they both contributed to it. But, MS realized that it might wipe out Windows 3.1, so they rushed Windows 95 to the market to crush it. Windows NT came out with some of the concepts they learned from developing OS/2. The NTFS file system is a stripped out version of HPFS from OS/2.

That's a bummer. OS/2 was a peach! It has one of the most sophisticated systems for threading and task scheduling. It was also POSIX. My first job as a software engineer was with OS/2 Warp 4.

 

[Blaster]

prefer Macs but expensive when compared to PC windows