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During the last ten years we have built up a regular customer base well into the thousands which includes exactly 23 Mac owners (30 machines in total). To a man (& woman) they all delight in telling me (and probably anyone else who will listen) how superior Mac's are over PC's.
All of them are on first name terms with both of us!! That is how well we've got to know them - fortunately Mac's in general are straightforward to fix when they do go wrong. Unfortunately as mentioned earlier, the parts are mostly bespoke and expensive compared to PC parts. Also can be difficult to source sometimes.
Got an old iMac on the bench at the moment with a faulty dial-up modem... Being a Mac of course the modem is "bound" (binded?) to the network port so it won't network either!! (Customer is wired broadband through a router).
Were it a PC I would simply remove / disable the modem as it's not used or needed but as it's a Mac I am forced to source and replace the exact part as the OS will throw a fit and fall over if I carry out any hardware changes!!! (been there before - got the tee shirt!!).
In my opinion, OS's up to 9 beat the hell out of the M$ offerings of the period (3.1 / 95 / 98) for speed / stability but OSX' regardless of updates or patches, never has been a serious competitor for 2K or XP - after all you can now specify XP as an install on a new Mac!!!
I still like Mac's though - they are very agreeable to use when set up and running properly..... just don't think I'll ever own one!
John
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I'm of the mind that different operating systems all have their use.
Windows is a great user-friendly OS for the average Joe. Windows is also great for user management on Domains. Straight forward tools and strong security policies and low training requirements for staff make it a great choice in the workplace. Additionaly Vista Corp edition has a fully functional Unix shell. I see windows/unix being crossed over and conjoined. The best of both worlds? Maybe.
I find the following little fact *very* interesting regarding the regular distro's of Vista.
Windows XP:
Command prompt:
CD /windows
Response:
The system cannot find the path specified
Winows Vista:
Command promtp:
CD /windows
Response:
c:\windows\
Did they make things easier for linux users or did they forget to remove something from the "borrowed" shell?
Linux/Mac, I toss these together due to the fact that they are both based on the Unix kernel. These two operating systems have a lot of "good" things in them, things i might add got stolen in Vista, if UAC is not a direct parallel to sudo, i don't know what is. What linux excels in is a super stable operating system (i hit 700+ days uptime with my linux server) it's very locked down in regards to file structure and is a very hostil environment to Virus's/hackers.. again, things we now find in Vista. The downside to unix is the high cost in training needed to make it work
I've avoided hardware, cause no matter what operating system you have, if the base is not good and solid, everything will fall like a house of cards
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Here's the bottom line:
Windows is an OS, and it's publishers have put out a set of specifications for machines to run this OS, but really has no means to enforce those specs other that it runs like crap if you don't follow them. Hence the need to research, buy and carefully assemble quality components (or buy from a vendor you trust to put together quality hardware).
OSX is also an OS, but it's publishers also have near absolute control over the hardware that it runs on. So there's no issues with finding the right hardware, or getting the right driver version, etc.
Most anything can be "made to work" on a PC. And it doesn't always take an extreme level of geekeeytude to do so.
Not everything works on a Mac, but for the things that do work, there is no "make it work" - IT JUST WORKS! True, if you're a Unix (FreeBSD actually) geek, you can probably make OSX do damn near anything you want, but most of us aren't that geeky.