Thread: Mac vs. PC: The Ultimate Lab Test for New Desktops & Laptops

You can have this one Chris.

Originally Posted by

You can have this one Chris.

I have been a PC user for many years, but acquired a mac laptop(G4) about a year ago.

I must say I have been pretty disappointed so far.

I get far more lockups and crashes on the mac than I ever got with PCs, and the lack of software and hardware support has been very frustrating.

The mac is pleasant to look at, and OSX looks pretty, but when I actually need to get work done I go for the PC everytime....it just works. It takes a lot more mucking around to get the same thing done on the mac.

czzer,

Can you be more specific? It sounds like something is awry with your laptop hardware or os installation. Did you get the OS install disks with it when you bought it? The G4 laptops have been out of production for some time now, did you buy it secondhand?

woodbe.

Have you installed Security Updates lately, do you run Permissions every day, do you run Disk utility everyday, there are so many questions to ask here.

It's second hand from my brother in law, who's a big mac fan.

I don't do anything to it apart from the updates it installs automatically.

The lock ups aren't my biggest gripe, I guess I'm just saying that macs aren't immune to them...they are a fact of life with any compuuter.

At the end of the day, macs and PCs are extremely similar in use and performance for most tasks. OSX does some things better than XP, and does other things worse, but they have a lot more similarities than differences. (I won't mention Vista...I haven't used that and have no intention to at the moment.)

It just seems the mac is determined to be different in some ways just for the sake of being different. Like the stupid one button mouse, and the lack of a forward-delete key. There's no reason to do it that way apart from trying to be different, but they just end up making it annoying to use.

Also, there are still a lot of programs I use that do not have a mac version, and I haven't been able to find a mac equivellent that works as well as the PC version. An example is DVD Profiler, which is a DVD cataloging program.

Then theres the budget laser printers that won't work with a mac via Printer Sharing. I had to fork out for a much more expensive one to work with the mac.

Basically I haven't found anything the mac does better than the PC, but I have found a few things it does worse. I know with the newer macs I can run Windows, but if I do that I may as well buy a Windows machine anyway and save a heap of money.

czzer,

Never let the Software automatically update security updates etc. first without checking http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ for known issues regarding updates - that's your first big mistake. If it ain't broke don't fix it. I haven't installed a Security Update for 3 years. Before any new programme instalation first run Disk Utility and click Repair Disk Permissions, after you instal the programme - whatever it is- then run Disk Utility and click Repair Disk Permissions again before doing anything else.

You may/may not have 3rd part applications installed on your G4 that have issues with the Apple updates. My 17" P/Book G4 is 4 years old and never had a sneeze because I'm extremely careful of what I put on it - goes for my other Mac as well.

If you have the new (about a year old or two now) with the wheel in the centre it actually has three buttons, which if you look under System Prefs> Keyboard & Mouse you can programme it the way you like.

As counterpoint to Waldo's extreme care of OS, I have to admit that I just let software update do it's thing, and I hardly ever play with the disk permissions. (I might have done it once) My current Mac is a Mac Pro, and it's been on 24/7 since I bought it when they came out a couple of years ago. It only gets rebooted for power failures and software update.

Never had a lockup on it. ever. Use all kinds of software on it, some of it is rubbish, but no games. Firefox gets a bit slow after it's been running for a couple of weeks with about 20 active tabs, that's my only complaint and it isn't really a Mac thing.

In fairness, I get a pretty good run out of the PC too, but it gets more temperamental the longer it runs, so it doesn't get run as much, especially since Parallels got installed. Linux is the benchmark, I have a little server in the basement that never misses a beat Current uptime there is 21 days since the last power failure. Like the Mac, it has never crashed.

I'd guess that the majority of Mac users are doing updates and not caring about permissions. If the OS routinely became horribly unstable because of Apple Sanctioned updates, I'd dump it. I offer a data point of one instance where that is not the case.

woodbe.

An extra point to with Permissions, a Mac runing 24/7 will do them automatically at certain times of the day (from memory I ), one of which is 3:00am, if it's not on 24/7 do them yourself, I know the same applies to Daily, Weekly and Monthly which are automatic.

Doing these two things daily I have saved getting in a bloke to fix things at $100 an hour.

Maybe you're right Waldo, but I cannot find it. I've attached a piccy of all the tasls I can see that run, and had a look in the log, but nothing like a permissions check is logged.

If this issue was half as big as you make out, there'd be uproar.

woodbe.

G'day Woodbe,

I stand corrected, it's the daily, weekly and monthly tasks that are automated so long as your Mac is on at the right time of day/night.

I think that's right.

A machine that is on for extended times will generate a lot of cruft in the logs and temp files that need cleaning up and rotating to keep things humming along. A machine that's only on for short periods might never run some of these, and never need to. Maybe there's another process that watches them anyway...

Gone are the days when a changed date on a unix machine kicked off all the cron jobs that were supposedly missed in between the old and the new dates

woodbe.

Originally Posted by Chipman

We have had macs (os9 and all versions of osx) on our network for many years too and at a very basic level, have had no trouble (although the newer versions of Safari don't like our proxy server but Firefox is great). Airport and bluetooth are great, the only issue is the networked homefolders. It actually worked correctly for 2 weeks and without anyone changing anything, it stopped working again. We get charged $170 an hour and endup with something that doesn't work properly after such a short time! If there is anyone out there who really knows how to fix it, it would be great!

Chipman

Chipman off topic but quick question, the wife is getting a Mac for graphics work can you hook that up to a router network that is running wintel boxes?

The comparison between the platforms is bollock (can I say that) btw, the uptake of Vista is well below expectations. A better comparison is between XP Pro and OS X. Besides which am absolutely sure I can throw together a box that is cheaper than an iMac and which will blow the mac out of the water Closed systems versus open systems being the difference there.

MovieHeretic

The answer is yes. At home, we have a netgear router with bigpond cable internet set up as a dhcp server for mainly windows boxes and the mac will acess the internet through it without any problems. (leave all browser settings blank)

At school we have windows server 2003 that acts as a proxy server and redirects all traffic to the internet. The only difference is at school with the windows network you have to set the network settings in MAC Firefox or whatever browser you use. (If your wife is going to use a system like this, she will have to get some details from whoever runs the network) Then it is neccessar to unchek these settings when working at home.

If you only want internet access then there is no need to actually join a windows network. Just leave all the network seetings in system preferences to automatic or server assigned. This is the way I would recommend she does it. If you need access to windows shared folders, just manually use apple K .

If she needs to actually join a windows network or domain, it is relatively easy through the directory utility in applications/utilities in osx 10.4/10.5. There is also software that can be bought so osx can read windows ntfs files or connect using smb://server/filename etc with apple k

Just remember one thing... IPHOTO will not work from a smb or samba file, only MAC AFP files


I hope this helps

Chipman