Windows 7 or Mac

[cyberface]

Zumbruk said:

cyberface said:

Zumbruk said:

Fittster said:

Well if it helps I work for a huge IT consultancy and no one I know of has a Mac. Quite frankly if I can get a telnet window to the servers I really don't give a monkeys about the O/S.

If you can get a telnet window to anything on "my" network, someone's going to be having a deep and meaningful conversation with their boss about security.

Is that a challenge????

Naah, I meant the plonker who's fired up a telnet daemon on a server rather than the plonker who then connects to it.

You could be *really* charitable and consider that he's one of those old-school types who still call any remote shell (even ssh, which is what it should be as you're implying) 'telnet'.

The problem with 'ssh-ing' into my server is that it's actually quite hard to say out loud comfortably. Do you go with the 4-syllable 'ess ess aitch ing' and run the risk of slurring the second S? (very easy to say 'ess esh aitch' ) Saying 'ssh' as in 'be quiet' makes you sound like a nutter and you run the risk of even clued-up techies having no idea what you're on about. 'Secure shelling in' is 5 syllables but if you forget the 'in' as I didn't include it in the original, it's still 4 syllables. 'Telnetting' is 3 and rolls off the tongue better.

Is this just me, and I ought to cut down on the medication, or does everyone have this issue with actual pronunciation of technical terms, especially acronyms? I guess the real nerds who only communicate via text don't have this problem, and immediately elevates my 'cool' factor by proving I actually *speak* to *people* !!!!

[cyberface]

Ordinary_Chap said:

cyberface said:

Ordinary_Chap said:

It's my new fav OS for getting things done, although I still love OSX.

OC - how small can you make a sensibly usable installation of Windows 7?

I'm going to stick an install into a VMware virtual machine on my MBP and Mac Pro. I've got shed loads of RAM so that isn't an issue, but I run SSDs so disk space *is* an issue.

I don't want to hack it down randomly - may as well see Microsoft's best shot in its best light i.e. installed *properly* so it's nice and stable. However it'd be a right pain if the smallest properly usable install takes up 10 GB or something obscene. OS X is nasty like that and you have to know what's safe to remove... I'm not sure I know Win7 well enough to know what is safe to remove...

I believe 8.6gb is the minimum without hacking stuff off it and then i'd expect you'll need a 15-20gb partition (preferably more) for apps and the page file.

Windows 7 can actually run very well on 1gb of ram although it, like any other modern OS prefers more.

It's grease lightening on my work laptop with 3gb and my work desktop with 2gb. Boot time on my quad core machine desktop machine is less than 30 seconds.

I have a older laptop that can run 7 with it's older core 2 and 1gb of ram without issue.

Bugger, as per bold above. Whilst MS are to be applauded for getting its latest OS to run happily on 1 GB of RAM, 15-20 GB minimum partition makes it a non-starter on my production laptop just to try it out

I have 8 GB of RAM on my laptop. This means I can run everything at full speed, and my Intel G2 SSD is the absolute dog's - but with only 160 GB space, and 11 years of intellectual property, a full Leopard install and a small-as-possible XP install with SQL Server and a fixed income attribution app (hand-trimmed from 26 GB down to 5 or so)... I can't really spare 15-20 GB. Not comfortably.

I could bung it on a spare disk in my Mac Pro and run it in VMware there, but I can't see myself testing Windows out for fun in my *very* limited leisure time at the moment - no disrespect intended - I could however justify testing it during billable hours purely to see whether my attribution app runs on it. The attribution app is single threaded and 32-bit, but I've made some huge strides in scalability by running multiple instances of its reporting engine in parallel - using certain proprietary configs of SSDs. The previous issue stopping everyone running multiple instances was I/O - the app utterly shreds the disks and the I/O operation queue would get high enough to bring the entire OS to its knees with more than 2 reports running. I've now got 8 running concurrently at linear scalability - the box has 16 'cores' (hyperthreading) so I doubt it'd scale past 12 but it's fast enough to blow my client away using 8.

Now this is on XP - presumably Windows 7 has better CPU and process scheduling, better I/O balancing, etc. - watching one task (that on a single thread eats 100% CPU) round-robin on a 16-core box, pinging from core to core, just looks inefficient. If Windows 7 has some concept of thread or CPU affinity and doesn't execute loads of wasteful context switches then it could run my app even faster... just a thought.

So far, I've only seen Windows 7 on true-blue Microsoftie laptops (well, people who are as enthusiastic about Microsoft's technologies as I am about Apple's ) and you only ever demonstrate the 'cool' features of an OS to people. It's difficult to 'show off' most of the stuff in Snow Leopard because it's APIs for developers. However using one, two, three and four finger swipes on the huge trackpad on my MBP activating Exposé, sliding around Spaces, scrolling vertically and horizontally in apps that don't have the focus, etc. are easy tricks you can do to 'show off' a modern Mac. It doesn't tell you anything about how good the OS is to use.

For that reason, before I come down off the fence about whether Windows 7 is any good or not, I'd like to run it for long enough to have a decent opinion. And I can't easily find a way to justify spending enough time on it to acquire that valid opinion

This, I fear, is one of the major reasons behind OS religious wars - very few people have extensive experience and enough full working days using both OSes in the fight du jour to really have reasoned arguments

Anyway we've gone full circle. Having realised how immensely productive it can be to have a laptop as powerful as the majority of full-on workstations, I'm now addicted to having the fastest SSD I can buy, and as much RAM as will fit. My MBP is currently as fast as I could feasibly make it. However Intel will eventually bring out a 320 GB version of their X25 SSD, and it may be even faster (if there are 320 GB versions 'on sale' now - they may have Intel product codes but just try finding one for sale - it took me a month to get the 160 GB G2 drive, and many weeks waiting to get enough 80 GB drives to build the array for my attribution app). Once that is available for no more than £500 then I'll have one and will finally have enough space for a test Windows 7 virtual machine.

I could use a FW800 external drive, though an SSD can saturate FW800 it's still a mighty quick interface. But I use an MBP13 for the portability, and don't carry external drives around with me or any more hardware / accessories than I *need*. So I'd only be able to test at home - and that falls foul of the original argument about billable / leisure time. I could leave a drive on client site and try it there, I guess...

Anyone got a free copy of Windows 7 they could lend a sceptical Mac user? (yeah, it was a joke, so don't bin the post because of 'piracy' or whatever, ta)

[Patrick Bateman]

I've had windows 7 since the release candidate and now Home Premium installed.

'It just works!'

[LDN]

I do love Mac OSX and my MBP holds a special place in my studio but I have to say that this 400 quid 'workhorse' laptop I've just bought with Windows 7 is continuing to impress. After a couple weeks with it now, it just hasn't faltered once - now, you might ask, why should that be something to celebrate but I have just installed the version of Photoshop that I'm most comfortable with, 5.5! (circa late 90's I think) and it's installed and started running in literally a minute. I realise that Windows 7 allows for older programs to run as part of it's compatability mode but I was expecting all sorts of menus to get through and bleeding options to choose.

I hold fort that for 400 quid, you can now get an amazing spec laptop with an OS that truly holds up.

[paddyhasneeds]

Got the same dilemma myself. I was convinced that as soon as the new iMacs were released I'd rush out and get the 27" one to replace my current 24" running Tiger.

However, running Windows 7 at work and it's a bloody nice OS and has me wondering whether it's worth dropping £1400 or just spending £300 on a Netbook with Windows 7 starter and keeping the Mac for "heavier" duties.

[thunderbelmont]

All this Mac Vs Windows stuff. Pah!

I had a computer that said in the manual - Install Windows 95 or better.

So I did.

I installed Linux!

This HP/Compaq slaptop runs dual boot. I have a now ageing release of Ubuntu Linux (8.04) on here, as well as XP-Pro (refused Vista due to it being crap). Under Linux I often run up VM-Ware and have Windows 7 on it. I'm quite impressed by how well it works in the VM compared to XP - it's faster, which tells me that it's processor overhead is lower - that's a good thing because Vista is dramatically higher!

The mass media only ever talk Windows or Mac, but keep forgetting that stable little fellow that runs on more servers than MS bugware, and is very very secure - especially the full blown SE-Linux.

My next machine (not sure what it'll be yet) will be multi-boot. I may well add OS-X to it too.

If only Steve Jobs hadn't been so stick-in-the-mud and not made a platform independent version of MAC-OS all those years ago, Microsoft wouldn't be in the position they are now, the world would probably be nearly all Mac.

[Noger]

In fact Rory Cellan-Jones mentioned Linux on the BBC recently whilst discussing Windows 7 etc.

And he wrote on his blog that he didn't find the new Ubuntu thing particularly easy to use after the initial "this looks nice", but that there was a lot to admire.

He got hugely flamed by a lot of people with no life. And one actually said it didn't matter if people used Linux or not, that wasn't what it was about, so ner.