I have joined the dark side

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

I have been using Vista for a few months now and do not like it. It is, in my experience, less stable than XP (and I keep it up-to-date). While I do not do anything fancy on my 'puter (Word, Excel, Outlook, and Act remain open constantly and Acrobat Pro is used quite a bit), I am on it constantly throughout the day. RAM management is buggy, forcing me to reboot at least once a day.

Yeah, I've noticed the occasional memory leak (though to be fair, that's more likely the fault of some software vendor who incorrectly uses Vista's memory management interface than Vista's fault itself).

I'm hoping that SP1 (currently in beta) will address the performance issues I've seen.

[NirvanaMan]

Originally Posted by Alex

But in looking at it in person at the Apple store I don't care for it visually in person. Something about it just looks toylike to me.

Curious about what led you to think that, as it was quite the opposite for me. The real aluminum fascia, aluminum stand and glass screen with piano black bezel made it look more solid and industrial than any other consumer PC product. The cheap-o plastic cases that IBM-clone makers are still using really eventually drove me away.

It was the visual quality of the iMac, especially the new Al one that really sold me. That and the aluminum keyboard is pretty trick too. A couple PC makers (Sony & Gateway) have tried to develop a similar solution, but they don't match the performance of the iMac and still lack the elegance of the Apple design.

And I am certainly no fanboy of apple. I am one of the few that god forbid thinks the iPod has flaws.

Cherny - Yeah. Apple for some reason, even with an Intel-based chip, can't seem to manage decent game performance. I don't get it. But, I haven't played a computer game since college so it didn't weigh heavily into my decision.

[NirvanaMan]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Is the current Mac OS super searchable like Vista is? As slow as our laptop is (and it is. slow. very. slow.) I'm already getting used to the neat capabilities.

From the reviews I have read on Cnet,the search capability in Leopard is supposed to be far superior to Vista. FWIW.

I may dual boot with Vista/Leopard, though I have been hearing some not so great things about Vista lately. Ah if only Windows 2000 was still supported. Or even better, NT 4.0.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by NirvanaMan

Cherny - Yeah. Apple for some reason, even with an Intel-based chip, can't seem to manage decent game performance. I don't get it. But, I haven't played a computer game since college so it didn't weigh heavily into my decision.

Chicken and egg scenario. Because it's historically not a game system, no one is spending much time, money, effort to develop for it, even if the system architecture might be catching up/have caught up to PC.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by NirvanaMan

I may dual boot with Vista/Leopard, though I have been hearing some not so great things about Vista lately.

Also, try a program called Parallels. A co-worker has it installed on his Intel Mac here at the office and it seems to work well.

[BarTopDancer]

My old roommate has a Vista PC and a iBook he dual boots (with XP). He hasn't had any issues with Vista and loves the dual boot feature of the Mac.

If you don't have your heart set on Vista, you could probably still find a copy of XP around to dual boot with.

My next computer will be a Mac. I love my XP Dells (desktop and PC) but I am not going to take the Vista leap for a bunch of reasons; stability being one of them.

[Snowflake]

And I am still hopping back and forth from one foot to the other. Looking longingly at the Macbook and a Dell XPS (or 1721 inspiron). Since I am working more in graphics (book and website) and podcasting, it would seem to make sense for me to go with a mac. I can run word on a Mac, right? What about outlook? What graphics program can I use? I have used, almost exclusively, Paint Shop Pro. I know I will have to invest in bunches of new software once I do make the leap, either way. (BTW, Kevy I just invested in the full version of AVG and fired McAfee, it's great!)

[NirvanaMan]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Chicken and egg scenario. Because it's historically not a game system, no one is spending much time, money, effort to develop for it, even if the system architecture might be catching up/have caught up to PC.

Well that's the odd thing. Now that you can run Windows on a Mac, you can run PC games. But they don't perform well. And the system architecture is actually stronger for less money than comparable all-in-one pc systems nowadays.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by NirvanaMan

Curious about what led you to think that, as it was quite the opposite for me.

I don't know, it is just a general response. But I generally don't respond well to the Apple design aesthetic anyway. We were in an Apple store the other day and saw that new small wireless keyboard and simultaneously Lani said "wow, doesn't that look great" and I said "wow, that is ugly."

Mac design, in my view, just looks like it is trying to hard to be hip.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by NirvanaMan

Well that's the odd thing. Now that you can run Windows on a Mac, you can run PC games. But they don't perform well.

That much isn't surprising at all. It may be more similar to PC architecture, but it's still got plenty of proprietary stuff that is not optimized to run PC-programmed software (or, from a different view, PC-programmed software is designed to take advantage of different efficiencies than are available in Mac hardware).