Mac vs. PC?

DBS

LMAO...

-Daryl

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Stihl MS 361

DBS

keep you PC clean and you nose (fingers) out of trouble on da net you shouldnt have any issues...

-Daryl

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Ekka

I'm running sweet with 2 gig of ram, 3800x2 duel core AMD, XP sp2. Had this couple of years now I think.

Looking at getting a big external hard drive to back everything up to.

But I do know this. If you have all your programs running on C Drive say. You back that up to an external. Then pull that C drive out and shove a new one in with the back up on it, it doesn't work anyway. I know as I have tried it.

I have all my programs on C drive, all my files on D drive.

I have found if you load a program to D drive which doesn't have the operating system then it doesn't work as good and sometimes at all.

Programs are best loaded to the drive with the operating system on it.

I have very few issues, however can say that with the plethora of flash, websites that are embedding hidden flash and sound that as you surf these days you may be experiencing delays, lock ups etc but it's those dumb webmasters out there with bells and whistles rather than brains causing some of the havoc.

Even large corporations websites are getting increasingly worse to navigate, pop ups, talking characters and all sorts of junk and jingles that wreak havoc on your browser and settings. Embedded flash video files that do not stream are also very common, not everyone surfs with 20mb line speed.

In a recent interview Google's Matt Cutts spelled it out, keep it simple! But the software to knock up a website in 10 minutes is out there cheap, flash website templates, very cheap, prompts you where to add sound, what the button should read on mouse over, what the link should be, drag and drop page layout yadda yadda yadda ... very simple, but when the Google and the surfer come along you bugger them up.

So if you experience a lock up, think about what you were doing.

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Aerial

That is because you are just copying the files over I presume. Windows needs the boot tracks to be in the first sectors on the hard drive, a general Windows copy command doesn't do this. It's fundamentally flawed in this, and many other areas.

OSX has had a built in cloning program called "Disk Utility" this allows you to make an image of any hard drive, even your boot drive, to a .dmg image file. I use this to backup my entire boot drive, applications, data, and settings. This image can then be restored on any hard drive and you can then boot from it, it's an identical, bit for bit, copy.

I restore this image of my boot drive to an external firewire hard drive and can boot any Macintosh into my complete setup. Of course this is only as recent as your last backup, sooo...

Anyway, with Leopard it is even easier now that it ships with "Time Machine" if left unattended it makes hourly backups of your entire hard drive, and this can be restored to a fresh drive in the event of drive failure. With "Time Capsule" you can do this wirelessly for all the Macs you own.

There are several Windows utilities that do a similar function, if in a less elegant and intuitive way, than on the standard Macintosh. Here is a link to one:

Drive Image Backup Software for Windows :: Image for Windows

That is because Windows has stuck with the ancient CP/M limits on the naming of drives or devices. "C, D, E, ect... " I find this archaic, inflexible, 30 year old method of naming drives pathetic. I guess in Vista you can assign aliases now, but I'm really not sure.

I generally just give my drives their actual name and size. For example my Mini's boot drive is "Hitachi 200", On my PowerBook my hard drive is named "Hitachi 100" (both 7200 rpm drives with 16 MB cache). Not very original, but it works for me. Many Mac users give their hard drives cute names, I did that for a few years, but then got so many hard drives I ran out of cute names.

My wife's MacBook, while twice as fast in CPU speed, suffers from a small (60 gig), slow hard drive and only 512K of RAM. My four year old PowerBook runs rings around it because of 2 gigs of memory and super fast hard drive. (which I added last year as an upgrade).

On the Macintosh it doesn't matter where you put you applications. In general I try to put them on the fastest drive available. Also, because OSX puts applications in "packages" they can be dragged and dropped to wherever you want them. No reinstallation or reconfiguration needed. It just works. Similarly if you want to delete a program, just drag it to the Trash. To install a new program just drag it to wherever you want it. Marvelously simple, the way it ought to be. No drivers, installing hassles, no "DLL Hell" to sort out.

On my PowerMac Dual processor tower (circa 1999) I have a total of five hard drives. Two are paired together with Raid 1, which maintains them as mirrored drives, both identical and ready to seamlessly take over in the event of drive failure. This has already happenedf to me, and the only way that you know anything's wrong is a message pops up informing you. You can go right on working without missing a beat.

Two other drives are paired together in a Raid 0 configuration. Both drives acting in tandem, doing interleaved reads and writes for maximum speed and response. This is where I put my games and applications. They load really fast and can bring in additional program modules which gives great response time for even bloated programs like Photoshop.

The fifth hard drive is a laptop drive that fits right on my hardware accelerated RAID card. All I keep on it is OSX to boot from in an emergencey. Very handy for trouble shooting problems, I guess, other than the one hard drive failure the tower has been trouble free, just like all the (numerous) other Macintoshes I've ever owned.

I can't even imagine trying to manage this system if all the drives could only be assigned letters! It also has a DVD burner and a Zip drive, plus at times multiple firewire external drives, An alphabet soup of devices.

Lets see, were did I put that invoice? A?, B?, C?, D?, E?, F?, or was it G? That is so arbitrary, why didn't they use Q.W.E.R.T.Y or something easy to find?

You get what you pay for. In other news, I just bought a STIHL saw today, my first chainsaw.

"Keep it simple" it's what Macs do.

Aerial

Ekka

Maybe next PC then.

I bought an external hard drive and backed up all my stuff today. Just in case.

Man, hasn't the price of them plummeted!

So ole Gates won the war with an inferior system, smart man!

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Tree Machine

Sometimes its about getting out there first.

Aerial

It's nice to use one of the cloning programs like the one I linked to because it allows you to restore your system files as well as your data.

This is nice because a "normal" reformat and reload of the OS. in your case Windows XP, means downloading service packs, drivers and a complete fresh installation and re-configuration of your setup.

By cloning your boot disk you get the system restored will all updates and configurations back just as it was. A real time saver.

Just how Bill Gates became the World's richest man is a story more like J. D. Rockafeller's than Albert Einstein's. Through swindled or outright stolen ideas or products, coupled with predatory monopolistic tactics he came to dominate the personal computing landscape.

Aerial

Tree Machine

And Microsoft not playing nice with the Quicktime format, a really excellent video and image and music format that PC's are seemingly not warm toward.

Well, Aerial, thanks for stepping up as a Mac dude extraordinaire. It's nice that you have PCs also and can speak from both sides.

What do you use your PCs for that you can't do on a Mac?

Aerial

Quicktime is an excellent example of how Microsoft has used it's monopoly power to attempt to "knife the baby" (a famous quote from an internal email memo that was published during the anti-trust trial) with regards to Apple's Quicktime media format. The crumby Windows support of Quicktime is Microsoft's revenge for it's existence.

I can use both platforms effectively, having spent many years selling Windows based systems into Corporate America. My two Windows systems I keep around for two specific purposes.

My somewhat elderly IBM Thinkpad is a Print server for a rather complex Xerox "Workstation" laser printer, scanner, and fax terminal. This heavy duty all-in-one printer predated OSX and one of the few printers that OSX has no built in drivers for. I can get it to print under OSX with emulating HP laser printer protocols, but not all of it's features. It was easier to just download the Windows 2000 drivers and give my trusty Thinkpad something to do in it's waning years.

I just recently (last Summer) bought my Toughbook and Microsoft Streets & Trips along with a USB GPS unit to act as an in car navigation system. This was a total failure because the Microsoft program caused repeated system crashes on the Microsoft operating System. This usually happened at the worst possible time, and was so frustrating that I went out and bought a Garmin.

What a piece of crap Streets & Trips is as a real time navigation system. But I do like the hardened nature of the Toughbook, and I still plan to use it when camping or in a blind photographing wildlife.



Aerial

Aerial

Is my posting high resolution images like the one above a problem for you bandwidth wise? If so I can post at lower resolutions.

Also, can you restore my ability to edit my posts? I rarely get it right the first time, and usual my edits have to do with formatting or punctuation issues, not content.

As an on topic aside, the Macintosh's built in, system wide, spell checker make me seem like I know how to spell, when that couldn't be further from the truth. This post had five boner spelling that it caught. (Some typos, most misspelling)

Aerial

Aerial

^^^ "usual" should be "usually"

My Mac's spell checker does not spot contextual errors.

Aerial

Aerial

Neither of my Windows systems have any form of virus or malware protection, they lead a sheltered existence under the firewall provided by my Macintosh and Network router.

Even so, I would never use either one of them for sensitive or important information. The thought of using a Windows setup of any kind for my online banking or buying gives me chills. Kind of like free climbing a frozen waterfall, a slippery slope indeed for the unexperienced.

Aerial

Aerial

DUH, had my first look at the Picture Forum, it's all explained here:

How to resize pictures, EASY! | Click here before posting a picture.

Still though, how do I FTP photos up to your server Ekka?

Aerial

Tree Machine

What about the Windows side of the Intel-based Macs. Is that Windows OS virus-proof because it is in a Mac?

Aerial

Oh no, not at all. Once a Macintosh is booted into Windows, it IS a Windows machine, just as susceptible to attacks as any other Windows machine.

What I was referring to was the protection afforded to the Windows machine by being behind the LAN managed by my Macs. Even this is not total protection for a machine that has a port open to access the Internet.

I don't do email, I don't download music or video, I don't do any critical online activities like banking or buying things with them. In fact the only reason that the Toughbook even had access to the net was light surfing before my wife got her Macbook.

If you do any of these things with your Windows systems you most definitely should use security programs to protect yourself and your data, even if your copy of Windows is running on an Apple computer.

Aerial

JohN Dee

You know, I once read an article on a company that ran all of it's business on and through windows. Then when somebody approached them and asked why don't they just run it on and through mac, the tech department replied with they'd all be out of the job and there would be no tech department.

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Therrin

Built my first PC when I was 8, before the windows OS was around. Used BBS's with modem stacks back then...oh what joy! Miss those days sometimes.

I've used Mac's at school, and they're okay for that. I think of mac's like a commuter vehicle, or something I'd lease. Whereas a PC is something I can slide underneath, do some work on, set it up for 4wheeling, etc etc.

Personally though, I love modding my computers. PC's are really the better way to go with that. Always upgrading one part or another, or pushing it to do something specific that I want. Except for a IBM Thinkpad I picked up about 7 years ago, I've never bought a computer. Each has been hand built; but therein lies the rub. I actually ENJOY buidling PC's. If it's not your thing, then I can understand why you'd stick with a Mac.

I used to have 1 PC for web browsing, 1 for Gaming, and 1 t