Buying a mac to run windows?

[skinnyman]

Might seem a bit backwards, but I run a few complex/memory hungry spreadsheets, and a few months back I borrowed my brothers Macbook air. He runs whatever the software is called that allowed him to run windows. Now, his Macbook managed to crunch the numbers on said spreadsheet alot faster than my more expensive and higher specced Windows laptop. My windows machine has an i5 to his i3, 8GB ram to his 4GB etc, and yet, even though he was running windows, it was still faster than my machine.

So this begs the question, is it backwards to buy an Apple product to run windows? Just a thought for when I next upgrade, I've always bought expensive (£1kish) Windows machines, on the assumption they should be as fast/faster than a mac running windows.

[skinnyman]

His is a base spec 2015 11" air, boots straight into windows, not using a VM.

I've got a HP Spectre 13, 1.6GHz i5, 8GB ram, 64 bit Windows 10, SSD, it was a £950 machine like 18mths ago, I'm not running a £300 PC World special.

I don't have any extra security software over the basic windows offering, not much software on there, mostly a bare bones build. Although I didn't do a fresh Windows install when new, so it is as it came from HP, so could potentially have alot of their crap running in the background, but I removed alot of useless software and turned off some background settings when I got it.

I bought the machine for its speed and portability, so just confusing when his cheaper, lighter Mac seemed to run windows based software faster.

[skinnyman]

I'll run a full clean install (when I can find the time), and then do another comparison.

But my machine has all the necessities to be a fast capable windows machine. 256GB SSD, 8GB 1600mhz ram in 2 4GB sticks, 1.6GHz i5 etc etc. All the ingredients are there, and it hasn't exactly had a hard life. It spends 99% of its time running Excel and Chrome.

[skinnyman]

RobDickinson said:

Spectre 13" base cpu is :
Intel® Core™ i5-6200U (2.3GHz, up to 2.8 GHz, 3 MB cache, 2 cores) + Intel® HD Graphics 520 (with 8G memory)

The 2015 macbook air is an i5 at 1.6ghz (apple never really say which but I am guessing a gen behind the spectre.

The spectre is a decent machine and shouldnt be slower than the apple when both running windows

Mines actually the i5 4200U, so 1.6GHz up to 2.3GHz in 'turbo' mode (there's been a few different versions of the Spectre 13 over the last few years)

Sat here on Chrome with nothing else open its using 10% CPU and 36% memory, this jumps to around 20% & 42% respectively when my beefy spreadsheet is number crunching.

My Excel is 2013 32bit, if the fact its 32 & not 64 makes a big difference?