Windows 7 or Mac
Discussion
Menguin said:
His arse?
Seriously, if people who work in IT can't handle turning on and off a Windows machine, they should think about refuse collection as a career change.
What rubbish. I work in IT, have used Windows for over 20 years now (from 3.0 onwards) yet use a Mac at home. I get paid quite handsomely for fixing IT problems at work (a major financial institution), I sure as hell don't want to spend my valuable free time sorting out problems with my home computer. An increasing number of my colleagues feel the same way and have gone over to the Mac too.Seriously, if people who work in IT can't handle turning on and off a Windows machine, they should think about refuse collection as a career change.
I used to think that Windows was great, up until the time I tried Panther and I was hooked. Having spent many hours helping friends and family with their Windows machines, I know I would never go back. Mrs C on the other hand hates OS X and much prefers Windoze.
CobolMan said:
Menguin said:
Incredible that I run Windows machines at home without having to spend hours fixing them every month.. The reliability of anything is determined significantly by the person using it IMO.
The PICNIC effect 
The best today was:
'The exchange server obviously isn't working, all of my emails are staying in the outbox.'
'Have you tried "working online"?
Just *loving* these patronising comments about 'users' from the IT support brigade 
You shouldn't need sysadmin skills to use a modern computer. Ergo, the operating system should get out of the way and the 'users' should be able to focus on using their applications, of which they may be absolute experts (the usual fun to be had is the IT technical support type being all patronising on a call from a financial user, only to find that the 'user' has forgotten more about Excel than the support chap has ever learnt, and the support bod can't help because he isn't an Excel *expert* like the user is).
It's a shift in emphasis. The OS should 'just work' and tinkering with the OS should be left for 'tinkerers' and people whose job it is to configure the OS so that it 'just works' i.e. system administrators. By and large, most modern OSes do just that - you shouldn't have Windows 7 locking up or crashing, and neither should Snow Leopard. In fact you should be able to go back many years worth of OS versions before you've got normally-unstable operating systems. Apple's OS X has been rock solid in most usual usage scenarios since later point releases of Puma, with Panther being the first properly-solid OS X. Windows has had the problem of viruses, worms and malware from the start, and as a closed source product the general consensus is that you're more likely to get a zero-day exploit on Windows because of fewer eyes on the code. It's largely impossible to prove or disprove that though due to the huge influence the size of the installed base has on exploits - more targets mean more people trying to find exploits, etc. and there aren't enough different OSes to make any comparison statistically significant.
That said, I found Win2k nicely stable (whilst I was using it, it went down only once, with a zero-day, Code Red) and didn't take a sysadmin to make reliable and solid.
There really is no excuse for the OS locking up or crashing, or for the 'users' to require sysadmin skills to keep their desktop working on a daily basis. So the question comes down to applications. As far as any user is concerned (and this includes me), the stability of a system is judged by what you use the machine for i.e. your application footprint. I couldn't care less if Tiger point release 11 is the most incredibly stable OS X ever, or whether Windows 7 is so amazingly solid that it NEVER crashes. If I spend most of my time writing incredibly complicated spreadsheets, then the stability / reliability of Excel becomes the most important factor.
Having some IT geek tell me that 'no, Windows is a superb operating system and never crashes, but the fact that you're having to restart your application 20 times a day is because Excel is poorly coded' misses the point, even though it's 100% correct. The applications *are* the system to users. The technical distinction between 'system' and 'application', 'kernel mode' and 'user mode' are irrelevant to everyone except geeks and developers. And it appears to be lost on many a Windows developer, judging by the amount of rubbish software that expects everyone logged in as Administrator and quite happily vomits code and data all over what should be protected *system* areas (at least Microsoft protected its libraries since... when? XP?). With OS X, apps can't write to system folders or damage system files unless you install it as setuid root, and that's incredibly poor practice and seriously frowned upon.
Anyway, the question 'Windows 7 or Mac' should, to be fair, firstly specify *which* OS X you're talking about. Windows 7 will support more hardware and enable fuller use of modern powerful hardware than its predecessors, and also early versions of OS X. Comparing like with like, I guess you need to compare Windows 7 with Snow Leopard.
But it's a meaningless question to anyone but geeks, who like OS religious wars. The question that makes sense to users is 'which system is most reliable for the applications that I run'. And that is a whole new question. Specific application suites only being available on Windows or OS X respectively limit you to choosing whatever platform the apps run on. Virtualisation is a possibility if you really want the flexibility, of course, and one that favours Mac hardware over generic Windows hardware, primarily because it's easier to run any type of Windows in a VM on an Intel Mac than it is to run any type of OS X in a VM on Windows 7 on generic PC hardware.
And in my feeble experience, the *vast* majority of 'system stability' issues come down to one class of applications in general, and one subset of sub-apps for this class. Web browsers. For 'general purpose computing', web browsing and other general internet activity apps are the number 1 most used tools. Maybe specific-purpose stats can be brought out to refute this claim, which is a bit broad, I'll admit. But I reckon the most-used applications (in terms of breadth of usage) are web browsers. Yes, you may only 'surf the net' but all those differently-coded pages give a web browser a broad test of its functionality (unless you only ever use Pistonheads and never look at any other pages, of course
). It's the same reason why I don't pay much attention to arguments about how OS X can be so stable because of the limited hardware base to test on. It's not the OS that's the problem - OS X is generally a stable OS and is similarly stable on Hackintoshes (if it works, it's likely to work similarly stably to a real Mac IME).
It's Safari and Firefox (and Opera and OmniWeb and Chrome, etc.) that dictate how 'stable' your OS X experience is. Some crazy statistic from Apple (later versions of OS X automatically ask the user if they want to send a crash report to Apple when a core, Apple-supplied piece of software, such as Safari, crashes. I believe Firefox does the same in terms of sending crash logs back to the Firefox project) showed that the Adobe Flash plug-in on Safari caused more crashes than *anything else* on Safari. In fact Flash caused more crashes in OS X than *anything else* in the entire OS X application universe, and by quite some margin. Since Adobe don't seem to want to fix the problem even though they've had years, Apple are now going all guns blazing to sandbox every page in Safari (like Chrome does) so when Flash crashes, it only takes down one window and not your entire Internet environment. It's also one of the reasons why the iPhone doesn't do Flash. Flash makes OS X look bad, and Apple don't like that. And Adobe are too big for Apple to just buy up and sort out (and being the developers of Photoshop and the Creative Suite... Apple owning Adobe would run into competition problems, almost a certainty in the EU and even probably in the USA).
So there's one big flashing red light for you right there. Mac OS X is a superb operating system. Its stability in day-to-day use, however, is controlled by Adobe Flash - and if you like Flash on the web, then I reckon you'll find Windows more stable, because Adobe's Flash plugin for Windows works better than its OS X counterpart.
Look, it's ALL about the apps. You can make an argument that Apple *user interface design* makes its core iLife suite of 'home' apps a really easy but powerful and reliable set of tools, which is hard (or expensive) to replicate on Windows. That's one argument for OS X. Most of the others veer into geek-land though (the reason why I love the Mac and OS X - it's Unix with a friendly face). Windows 7 is great but stability of apps comes down to which apps you use. I'd put money on Firefox on Windows being more stable than Firefox on the Mac, purely because of that damned Flash plugin. Chrome drops the problem by running each browser in a separate process, and the very latest Snow Leopard-only Safari build also does this, allowing just one browser window to die when Flash inevitably crashes. However that's bleeding edge stuff.
Personally I prefer OS X for the look and feel - you can tell immediately that there's a team dedicated to GUI design and human interaction research. You don't have to think like a developer to use it (which has caught out many a developer who tries the platform for the flexibility!). There are apps to cover all my bases, and then there's VMware and a lightweight install of XP for client stuff and 3rd party Windows apps. But that doesn't make the Mac a choice for everyone. And OS X's superb stability, proper security, Unix underneath, yadda yadda, makes no odds to a normal person buying a computer for 'general purpose home computing' if the web browser crashes every day due to s
te Flash ads eventually crashing the Flash plug-in, bringing the entire Safari process down with it.
Equally, Windows 7 could make VMS look as stable as Windows 95 but if the version of Internet Exploder that ships with Win7 (don't know the version) crashes regularly or is easily exploitable by crackers, or goes too far the other way and asks 'are you sure' *every* time you do any action, then that's a big argument *against* buying Windows. Yes, you can install Chrome. Equally, OS X users can too. I'm talking about the basic standard 'out of the box' experience that a large number of people will stick with.
Other stuff like viruses and general system security - well OS X has Windows beat on that, and even if Windows 7 is as secure as FreeBSD, there's too much mindshare tied up in Windows needing anti-virus and anti-malware and all that intrusive system-level software that actually can cause instability itself. The hearts and minds battle is already won by Apple - and the soundbite types at Symantec and the other 'anti-virus' vendors will continue to spread FUD in order to sell their product.
It *really doesn't matter* that a few sysadmins and tech support bods here can make either Windows or OS X crash-free for years. Normal day-to-day users will crash their web browser, regularly. And to them, that's just as bad as the OS crashing, since if you've got 50 browser windows with 230 tabs, losing all that state is a big deal. Features in browsers such as 'restore previous state' are great, but they have to work (Safari, shockingly, folds if you try to restore a BIG previous session - 300+ tabs for example spread over 40-60 windows) and they have to deal with the case that one of the pages just visited *caused* the crash. It's hard for browsers to know this (Flash ads are often served up on a random basis, like PH Flash ads, and if one is badly coded and crashes the browser, it may not appear in the same URL next time. Equally it may appear in a different URL and crash it there, so blocking the URL that caused the crash may not work).
In my entire use of MY computers (Apples, running OS X Leopard - not Snow Leopard yet), with both business and 'home' applications, and a pretty varied and power-type footprint from 'user' to 'power user' to 'developer' and 'hacker', my OS X instability comes down to two apps - Safari and the Finder. Safari crashes primarily because of Flash (since I've blocked it with ClickToFlash my Safari experience has improved dramatically), and the 'restore previous state' is buggy and doesn't like large numbers of windows. The Finder suffers from poor behaviour when network shares disappear or move about, or (as per the Apple iDisk) run extremely slowly and occasionally time out. This is simply poor code - the Finder was a Carbon app to show that the old APIs could still be used. It's completely rewritten in Cocoa on Snow Leopard. I may be down to ONE unstable application when I upgrade to the Sn0w kitty.
Google had a brilliant idea to sandbox each and every page. It's very heavy on system resources though and I doubt it'd be feasible 4 years ago. But on OS X, due to the unix process limits being very high and the fact that each window in OS X is an OpenGL texture *anyway*, it's not such a big leap to run each browser in a separate process. I'm looking forward to Snow Leopard's Safari that apparently does this.
You shouldn't need sysadmin skills to use a modern computer. Ergo, the operating system should get out of the way and the 'users' should be able to focus on using their applications, of which they may be absolute experts (the usual fun to be had is the IT technical support type being all patronising on a call from a financial user, only to find that the 'user' has forgotten more about Excel than the support chap has ever learnt, and the support bod can't help because he isn't an Excel *expert* like the user is).
It's a shift in emphasis. The OS should 'just work' and tinkering with the OS should be left for 'tinkerers' and people whose job it is to configure the OS so that it 'just works' i.e. system administrators. By and large, most modern OSes do just that - you shouldn't have Windows 7 locking up or crashing, and neither should Snow Leopard. In fact you should be able to go back many years worth of OS versions before you've got normally-unstable operating systems. Apple's OS X has been rock solid in most usual usage scenarios since later point releases of Puma, with Panther being the first properly-solid OS X. Windows has had the problem of viruses, worms and malware from the start, and as a closed source product the general consensus is that you're more likely to get a zero-day exploit on Windows because of fewer eyes on the code. It's largely impossible to prove or disprove that though due to the huge influence the size of the installed base has on exploits - more targets mean more people trying to find exploits, etc. and there aren't enough different OSes to make any comparison statistically significant.
That said, I found Win2k nicely stable (whilst I was using it, it went down only once, with a zero-day, Code Red) and didn't take a sysadmin to make reliable and solid.
There really is no excuse for the OS locking up or crashing, or for the 'users' to require sysadmin skills to keep their desktop working on a daily basis. So the question comes down to applications. As far as any user is concerned (and this includes me), the stability of a system is judged by what you use the machine for i.e. your application footprint. I couldn't care less if Tiger point release 11 is the most incredibly stable OS X ever, or whether Windows 7 is so amazingly solid that it NEVER crashes. If I spend most of my time writing incredibly complicated spreadsheets, then the stability / reliability of Excel becomes the most important factor.
Having some IT geek tell me that 'no, Windows is a superb operating system and never crashes, but the fact that you're having to restart your application 20 times a day is because Excel is poorly coded' misses the point, even though it's 100% correct. The applications *are* the system to users. The technical distinction between 'system' and 'application', 'kernel mode' and 'user mode' are irrelevant to everyone except geeks and developers. And it appears to be lost on many a Windows developer, judging by the amount of rubbish software that expects everyone logged in as Administrator and quite happily vomits code and data all over what should be protected *system* areas (at least Microsoft protected its libraries since... when? XP?). With OS X, apps can't write to system folders or damage system files unless you install it as setuid root, and that's incredibly poor practice and seriously frowned upon.
Anyway, the question 'Windows 7 or Mac' should, to be fair, firstly specify *which* OS X you're talking about. Windows 7 will support more hardware and enable fuller use of modern powerful hardware than its predecessors, and also early versions of OS X. Comparing like with like, I guess you need to compare Windows 7 with Snow Leopard.
But it's a meaningless question to anyone but geeks, who like OS religious wars. The question that makes sense to users is 'which system is most reliable for the applications that I run'. And that is a whole new question. Specific application suites only being available on Windows or OS X respectively limit you to choosing whatever platform the apps run on. Virtualisation is a possibility if you really want the flexibility, of course, and one that favours Mac hardware over generic Windows hardware, primarily because it's easier to run any type of Windows in a VM on an Intel Mac than it is to run any type of OS X in a VM on Windows 7 on generic PC hardware.
And in my feeble experience, the *vast* majority of 'system stability' issues come down to one class of applications in general, and one subset of sub-apps for this class. Web browsers. For 'general purpose computing', web browsing and other general internet activity apps are the number 1 most used tools. Maybe specific-purpose stats can be brought out to refute this claim, which is a bit broad, I'll admit. But I reckon the most-used applications (in terms of breadth of usage) are web browsers. Yes, you may only 'surf the net' but all those differently-coded pages give a web browser a broad test of its functionality (unless you only ever use Pistonheads and never look at any other pages, of course
). It's the same reason why I don't pay much attention to arguments about how OS X can be so stable because of the limited hardware base to test on. It's not the OS that's the problem - OS X is generally a stable OS and is similarly stable on Hackintoshes (if it works, it's likely to work similarly stably to a real Mac IME). It's Safari and Firefox (and Opera and OmniWeb and Chrome, etc.) that dictate how 'stable' your OS X experience is. Some crazy statistic from Apple (later versions of OS X automatically ask the user if they want to send a crash report to Apple when a core, Apple-supplied piece of software, such as Safari, crashes. I believe Firefox does the same in terms of sending crash logs back to the Firefox project) showed that the Adobe Flash plug-in on Safari caused more crashes than *anything else* on Safari. In fact Flash caused more crashes in OS X than *anything else* in the entire OS X application universe, and by quite some margin. Since Adobe don't seem to want to fix the problem even though they've had years, Apple are now going all guns blazing to sandbox every page in Safari (like Chrome does) so when Flash crashes, it only takes down one window and not your entire Internet environment. It's also one of the reasons why the iPhone doesn't do Flash. Flash makes OS X look bad, and Apple don't like that. And Adobe are too big for Apple to just buy up and sort out (and being the developers of Photoshop and the Creative Suite... Apple owning Adobe would run into competition problems, almost a certainty in the EU and even probably in the USA).
So there's one big flashing red light for you right there. Mac OS X is a superb operating system. Its stability in day-to-day use, however, is controlled by Adobe Flash - and if you like Flash on the web, then I reckon you'll find Windows more stable, because Adobe's Flash plugin for Windows works better than its OS X counterpart.
Look, it's ALL about the apps. You can make an argument that Apple *user interface design* makes its core iLife suite of 'home' apps a really easy but powerful and reliable set of tools, which is hard (or expensive) to replicate on Windows. That's one argument for OS X. Most of the others veer into geek-land though (the reason why I love the Mac and OS X - it's Unix with a friendly face). Windows 7 is great but stability of apps comes down to which apps you use. I'd put money on Firefox on Windows being more stable than Firefox on the Mac, purely because of that damned Flash plugin. Chrome drops the problem by running each browser in a separate process, and the very latest Snow Leopard-only Safari build also does this, allowing just one browser window to die when Flash inevitably crashes. However that's bleeding edge stuff.
Personally I prefer OS X for the look and feel - you can tell immediately that there's a team dedicated to GUI design and human interaction research. You don't have to think like a developer to use it (which has caught out many a developer who tries the platform for the flexibility!). There are apps to cover all my bases, and then there's VMware and a lightweight install of XP for client stuff and 3rd party Windows apps. But that doesn't make the Mac a choice for everyone. And OS X's superb stability, proper security, Unix underneath, yadda yadda, makes no odds to a normal person buying a computer for 'general purpose home computing' if the web browser crashes every day due to s
te Flash ads eventually crashing the Flash plug-in, bringing the entire Safari process down with it.Equally, Windows 7 could make VMS look as stable as Windows 95 but if the version of Internet Exploder that ships with Win7 (don't know the version) crashes regularly or is easily exploitable by crackers, or goes too far the other way and asks 'are you sure' *every* time you do any action, then that's a big argument *against* buying Windows. Yes, you can install Chrome. Equally, OS X users can too. I'm talking about the basic standard 'out of the box' experience that a large number of people will stick with.
Other stuff like viruses and general system security - well OS X has Windows beat on that, and even if Windows 7 is as secure as FreeBSD, there's too much mindshare tied up in Windows needing anti-virus and anti-malware and all that intrusive system-level software that actually can cause instability itself. The hearts and minds battle is already won by Apple - and the soundbite types at Symantec and the other 'anti-virus' vendors will continue to spread FUD in order to sell their product.
It *really doesn't matter* that a few sysadmins and tech support bods here can make either Windows or OS X crash-free for years. Normal day-to-day users will crash their web browser, regularly. And to them, that's just as bad as the OS crashing, since if you've got 50 browser windows with 230 tabs, losing all that state is a big deal. Features in browsers such as 'restore previous state' are great, but they have to work (Safari, shockingly, folds if you try to restore a BIG previous session - 300+ tabs for example spread over 40-60 windows) and they have to deal with the case that one of the pages just visited *caused* the crash. It's hard for browsers to know this (Flash ads are often served up on a random basis, like PH Flash ads, and if one is badly coded and crashes the browser, it may not appear in the same URL next time. Equally it may appear in a different URL and crash it there, so blocking the URL that caused the crash may not work).
In my entire use of MY computers (Apples, running OS X Leopard - not Snow Leopard yet), with both business and 'home' applications, and a pretty varied and power-type footprint from 'user' to 'power user' to 'developer' and 'hacker', my OS X instability comes down to two apps - Safari and the Finder. Safari crashes primarily because of Flash (since I've blocked it with ClickToFlash my Safari experience has improved dramatically), and the 'restore previous state' is buggy and doesn't like large numbers of windows. The Finder suffers from poor behaviour when network shares disappear or move about, or (as per the Apple iDisk) run extremely slowly and occasionally time out. This is simply poor code - the Finder was a Carbon app to show that the old APIs could still be used. It's completely rewritten in Cocoa on Snow Leopard. I may be down to ONE unstable application when I upgrade to the Sn0w kitty.
Google had a brilliant idea to sandbox each and every page. It's very heavy on system resources though and I doubt it'd be feasible 4 years ago. But on OS X, due to the unix process limits being very high and the fact that each window in OS X is an OpenGL texture *anyway*, it's not such a big leap to run each browser in a separate process. I'm looking forward to Snow Leopard's Safari that apparently does this.
Fittster said:
jimothy said:
I work in IT and out of a team of 10, 9 of us have Macs at home because we want an easy life
I'd love to know where that stat comes from.Guess what make he got...
The main reason IT spods buy Macs is they think it will make them appear more interesting to the opposite sex.
"oh he has a mac, he must be creative"
Obv. this only works for laptops, an iMac in the corner of a room littered with Domino's boxes, Evo magazines, and an xbox running "Death Kill Maim with guns III" just won't tip the balance
"oh he has a mac, he must be creative"
Obv. this only works for laptops, an iMac in the corner of a room littered with Domino's boxes, Evo magazines, and an xbox running "Death Kill Maim with guns III" just won't tip the balance
jimothy said:
Fittster said:
jimothy said:
I work in IT and out of a team of 10, 9 of us have Macs at home because we want an easy life
I'd love to know where that stat comes from.Guess what make he got...
cyberface said:
if you've got 50 browser windows with 230 tabs, losing all that state is a big deal. Features in browsers such as 'restore previous state' are great, but they have to work (Safari, shockingly, folds if you try to restore a BIG previous session - 300+ tabs for example spread over 40-60 windows) and they have to deal with the case that one of the pages just visited *caused* the crash.
I'm just trying to get my head around just who would have 50 browser windows with 230 tabs open at any one time? I don't see the point, I really don't. I work in I.T. and I don't know anyone who would do this, ever!Superb post Cyberface there, sorry for appearing to be condescending, I'm not like that really. However, some of the issues we get raised by end-users are unbelievable - it makes me wonder how some people manage to find their way out of bed in the morning.....
I agree with what you said about the OS - it should be invisible to the normal user and it should be as stable as possible. You're spot on with your comments about Safari - version 4 seems to be very flaky, I wish I hadn't bothered with upgrading it.
I think the OP needs to work out exactly what they want to use their new computer for now and in the next few years and whether they want to be tied to one particular platform or the other. I would personally go with Apple every time but that's just my preference.
I agree with what you said about the OS - it should be invisible to the normal user and it should be as stable as possible. You're spot on with your comments about Safari - version 4 seems to be very flaky, I wish I hadn't bothered with upgrading it.
I think the OP needs to work out exactly what they want to use their new computer for now and in the next few years and whether they want to be tied to one particular platform or the other. I would personally go with Apple every time but that's just my preference.
pbirkett said:
cyberface said:
if you've got 50 browser windows with 230 tabs, losing all that state is a big deal. Features in browsers such as 'restore previous state' are great, but they have to work (Safari, shockingly, folds if you try to restore a BIG previous session - 300+ tabs for example spread over 40-60 windows) and they have to deal with the case that one of the pages just visited *caused* the crash.
I'm just trying to get my head around just who would have 50 browser windows with 230 tabs open at any one time? I don't see the point, I really don't. I work in I.T. and I don't know anyone who would do this, ever!Let's say I'm a user. I have a Mac, with a 30" screen and a 18" screen connected to it. I get distracted by links and open new pages as and when I feel like it, grouping subjects by tab.
Yes, because I leave my Mac on all the time - I don't reboot daily (who the hell needs to do that anyway?) and I've got loads of RAM and Exposé / Spaces give me loads of screen real estate over and above the big screen to begin with... the number of browser windows build up.
I guess people who either are incredibly tidy and close a window when they've finished with it, or people who grew up with shoddy versions of Windows that needed regular reboots, may not get this browser-window-creep. Alternatively, perhaps it's just because on a Mac with loads of RAM, you *just can* do this, and when you can, you will find people will....
I don't consider myself that freaky in that way either. I'm not really a 'user' in the traditional sense, equally I'm not your typical IT guy, so I'm not a great example to point to. But I bet loads of Mac users with big screens have loads of windows open at once. It's not like MS Windows, where the task bar tells you how many IE windows you've got open (and unless you've got 'group similar apps' set on, you'll end up with an unusable taskbar with this many windows). Mac OS X doesn't work like that...
cyberface said:
pbirkett said:
cyberface said:
if you've got 50 browser windows with 230 tabs, losing all that state is a big deal. Features in browsers such as 'restore previous state' are great, but they have to work (Safari, shockingly, folds if you try to restore a BIG previous session - 300+ tabs for example spread over 40-60 windows) and they have to deal with the case that one of the pages just visited *caused* the crash.
I'm just trying to get my head around just who would have 50 browser windows with 230 tabs open at any one time? I don't see the point, I really don't. I work in I.T. and I don't know anyone who would do this, ever!Let's say I'm a user. I have a Mac, with a 30" screen and a 18" screen connected to it. I get distracted by links and open new pages as and when I feel like it, grouping subjects by tab.
Yes, because I leave my Mac on all the time - I don't reboot daily (who the hell needs to do that anyway?) and I've got loads of RAM and Exposé / Spaces give me loads of screen real estate over and above the big screen to begin with... the number of browser windows build up.
I guess people who either are incredibly tidy and close a window when they've finished with it, or people who grew up with shoddy versions of Windows that needed regular reboots, may not get this browser-window-creep. Alternatively, perhaps it's just because on a Mac with loads of RAM, you *just can* do this, and when you can, you will find people will....
I don't consider myself that freaky in that way either. I'm not really a 'user' in the traditional sense, equally I'm not your typical IT guy, so I'm not a great example to point to. But I bet loads of Mac users with big screens have loads of windows open at once. It's not like MS Windows, where the task bar tells you how many IE windows you've got open (and unless you've got 'group similar apps' set on, you'll end up with an unusable taskbar with this many windows). Mac OS X doesn't work like that...
CommanderJameson said:
Noger said:
The question was "Windows 7 or Mac". *OR* Do you understand that bit ? Or are you a bit "slow" ?
More specifically, iMac vs Windows 7 All in One.
Easy.More specifically, iMac vs Windows 7 All in One.
iMac, and install Windows 7 on it, Boot Camp stylee.
OS X for work, Windows 7 for play.
>Happy CJ<
I'm still not sure that touchscreens will e all that and a bag of fish. If you have a desktop pc, will you have your arms stretched out in front of you for the time you are doing your thing? I think that will get achy very quickly. tablet PC's, I can see, as it will be flat, and hands can rest.
Noger said:
CommanderJameson said:
Noger said:
The question was "Windows 7 or Mac". *OR* Do you understand that bit ? Or are you a bit "slow" ?
More specifically, iMac vs Windows 7 All in One.
Easy.More specifically, iMac vs Windows 7 All in One.
iMac, and install Windows 7 on it, Boot Camp stylee.
OS X for work, Windows 7 for play.
>Happy CJ<
The problem with a touchscreen on a desktop computer, from a UI point of view, is "gorilla arm syndrome".
Or can you unhitch it and use it as a tablet? That'd be nifty.
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff