i switched from winME to winXP and i can tell you that XP is one stable mother.
it's not at all unusual for me to leave my machine on 24/7 for a week or longer and not have to restart.
I experience program crashes but it doesn't affect the OS at all.
winXP comes highly recommended as far as stability goes.
agreed. compared to Win9x or WinME or Mac OS 10.0 or earlier, Windows XP is awesomely stable.
Originally Posted by Enterprise-D
1. Virus and hacking vulnerabilities are not hardware dependant except on a firewall. Further, a lack of vulnerability to viruses only applies to MacOS not the hardware. And this only appears so since virus writers recognize the 2% marketshare of MacOS and ignore it by and large. Saying therefore that you'll install XP or Vista on it negates this advantage.
Market share is a big part of the lack of viruses/spyware. No software can protect the user from themselves - if a black hat can trick you into installing his malware, then it doesn't matter what system you are on.
But at least *nix (including OSX) have 30 years of user security development behind them (unlike Vista's UAC), and don't run the common user as an admin (like XP).
przyk said:
The only thing that would bug me about it is the lack of "out of the box" software development tools and compilers, and the fact that '#' doesn't appear anywhere on the keyboard. That's just one particular iBook (G4) though.
1st, the dev tools do come with the machines, they are just not installed by default. A G4 iBook would have come with three disks - an OS install disk, a second OS disk with additional printer drivers for the super-professional types, and iLife. The dev tools are on disk #2.
second....umm, above the 3 key?
EDIT: I was chatting with a co-worker, and he reminded me that the British Powerbooks and iBooks had different Shift-number key symbols, and the British Pound symbol is over the 3 key. In order to get a #, you had to type Shift-Option-3. (or hit the KeyCaps application)
So you may been correct in your comment afterall
alain said:
Athelwulf, I hear you on getting a Mac, but they are sort of expensive. Does anyone know if its possible to use a mac OS on a non mac computer?
it has been done in the past, but it is not supported and drivers are not always available for certain hardware combinations.
There is a Palladium chip on the new Intel macs, but work-arounds have been available for more than a year.
phogistcian said:
My two penneth is that my gf's bro bought a Mac laptop, and it broke just out of warranty. He then went and bought a new one, which broke within two months, so he sent it away for repair, and it came back with the same problem, so he sent it away, and it in the first six months of ownership, it was away for repair for more than three months.
Just so I'm balanced in my replies, Mac low-end laptops have been having issues over the past three years. Comparison studies have shown that these issues are not out of line with industry standards (considering that with the move to intel, Macs are basically PC's on the inside), but that Mac users tend to be more vocal in thier complaints.
That plus Apple's switching of their iBook (and now MacBook) production to the FoxConn plant increased problem occurrences IMO. Things appear to be better with the MacBooks than with the last two generations of iBooks, but are still not as good as early G3 iBooks and before (minus the 5300C fiasco).
We'll have to see how quality issues crop up over the lengthening lifetimes of the intel-macs.
Enterprise-D said:
Google for reviews of Vista's UAC (user-access control) system. they have improved it since the initial Betas, but it's still a hack, and it shows. However, it's a hell of a lot better than XP.
Bubber said:
Don't care for apple because of price mainly. Looks nice and is a stable machine, but the premium you pay is just not worth it.
Macs tend to have a longer shelf-life than Windows machines. IME, my mom replaces machines once every 4-5 years. I average 6-7 years. The cost amortizes.
Bubber said:
I run Ubuntu Linux with no probs at all and have never looked back.
Oh, heh. Ok, Linux wins.

I like Ubuntu; had it running on an old Mac Mini, and also on an old throw-together PC. It's a really good system.
Enterprise-D said:
MacOS emulators for Windows have existed for years. Plus with the advent of Intel into the Apple space...what's to prevent MacOS from running on a PC?
The MacOS emulators only go up to OS9, as far as I am aware.
Palladium is the only thing preventing OSX from running on a whitebox PC. I'm not going to link to the available work-arounds either, though, as I'm sure it isn't kosher to do so here.
Enterprise-D said:
However 2000/XP are stable and very viable for use on many end-user PCs.
Agreed. I built my GF a win2000 box last year that we just upgraded to XP (she finally found some stuff for work that required XP). Perfectly acceptable for the amount of time she spends on it.
Same with my Mom. I had built her a Win98 box after her dumpster Win95 box died. recently built her an XP box, and she's happy enough with it. Trying to do home videos on it has been difficult, but it's good enough for the time being.
Now, I work on XP and 2000 all day, because the company I work for builds custom software for major companies and government branches; 95% of which use Windows. However, about 60% of my co-workers have our own Macs on which we perform most of our daily tasks; simply because that .01% increase in ease of use becomes a huge factor when you are working 9 hours days 5 days a week year after year. The same reason why many others in our industry have Linux on thier home machines.
The difference between the available OSs is not as drastic as it once was, but the difference is still there. If I wasn't working so much, I'd go Linux for the cost savings + the *nix backend. However, I'm not into compiling stuff when I', not doing it for work, and since I've been pulled into photography for the family events, Photoshop is a must. For work use, MS Office is also a must.
So *for me*, OSX's minor design advantages over Windows are a major plus, and OS X's binary application availability make it win out over Linux.
Windows does some things very well, others well enough for most needs, and some things horribly. Same with OSX (Finder and RAM caching, I'm looking at you!), but I find that OSX's issues are more often annoying, as opposed to Windows's show-stopping, or restart inducing.
glaucon said:
Currently, my uptime is 84 days plus.
No crashes.
Uptime comparisons should have gone the way of the dodo once we got into the realm of weeks.
In the past three years, I've only restarted my 7 year old G4 tower when I'm traveling for work, and shut it down since I won't be home for more than two days. I had some issues three years ago when a third-party HD controller PCI card died, and things got flaky. Since then; no problems at all. And that includes multiple OS updates, software installs and removals, dev tools installs and removals, HD swaps, and a GPU upgrade.
I've got a 2 month old Dell Latitude Centrino Duo for work that requires a restart roughly once every week and a half, and the OS randomly loses the Ethernet port (it puts the port into low-power mode, and then can't remember how to turn it back on again), which requires the Ethernet Drivers to be re-installed. Some of it's issues are Dell's fault, but most are XP, XP's user access design, or XP's driver memory access design.
to sum up: at least we are moving quickly away from shared .DLL's!!!!!