To Mac or Not To Mac?

[Geffy]

Anything prior to OS X sucked

 

[muzikool]

Anything prior to OS X sucked

Agreed. I loathe OS 9 and prior ones.

 

[Geffy]

I still remember my initial reaction to OS X

"Its UNIX and sexy!"

 

[Grandmaster]

And a Mac can now serve double-duty with both OS X and Windows installed. So the argument could be made that you get more for your money with a Mac than a PC. The new Mac ad isn't a lie, PC World did name a Mac as the fastest Vista-running machine of the year.

Right on. There's a reason why some huge corporations like Cisco Systems are now offering their employees a choice between Lenovo and Apple laptops.

There aren't any big compromises you have to make in choosing between a windows based machine versus a mac based machine. So now more than ever I think it's really down to personal taste in deciding which brand you want to go with.

 

[Dark Atheist]

once you go mac you never go back

 

[Geffy]

One thing to think about if you to go Mac and then use Boot Camp to use Windows as well is that you are limited to 32-bit versions of Windows and all the crap that entails. I've just installed Windows XP SP2 on my 4GB MacBook Pro and Windows can only see 3GB of it because its 32-bit or some such reason like that.

I hope Apple will write some 64bit Windows Drivers so I can switch over to an XP x64 installation and actually be able to make use of all my systems resources and capabilities.

So if you are likely to need heavy weight full 64bit or massive RAM Windows capabilities you might either want to go with a dedicated Windows machine, hope for Apple to release 64bit Windows drivers, or explore Mac based alternatives or possibly even UNIX based alternatives. Afaik 64bit UNIX variants should be alright.

You could multi boot OS X, Windows (Boot Camp) and others with rEFIt

 

[muzikool]

One thing to think about if you to go Mac and then use Boot Camp to use Windows as well is that you are limited to 32-bit versions of Windows and all the crap that entails. I've just installed Windows XP SP2 on my 4GB MacBook Pro and Windows can only see 3GB of it because its 32-bit or some such reason like that.

I hope Apple will write some 64bit Windows Drivers so I can switch over to an XP x64 installation and actually be able to make use of all my systems resources and capabilities.

So if you are likely to need heavy weight full 64bit or massive RAM Windows capabilities you might either want to go with a dedicated Windows machine, hope for Apple to release 64bit Windows drivers, or explore Mac based alternatives or possibly even UNIX based alternatives. Afaik 64bit UNIX variants should be alright.

You could multi boot OS X, Windows (Boot Camp) and others with rEFIt

Does this issue exist with Parallels and/or VMware as well? If not then those are alternatives, though you are sharing resources with OS X.

 

[Geffy]

Parallels afaik doesn't support 64-bit guest OS's but I think VMWare does. In a Mac Pro you might actually have enough ram to give 4GB to a VM but thats not a situation I'll be in with my MBP.

The reason I boot camp'ed Windows was for games which neither VMWare nor Parallels will ever be as good as dual booting with Windows, methinks I'll be buying Crysis tomorrow

 

[X-Istence]

Ah, finally got away from your MacBook eh Geffy?

I need to buy more ram for my laptop (currently at 2 GB, would like to have 4).

http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?p=813709

Contains good information about the 3.2 GB only available in Windows XP/Vista.

 

[Geffy]

Ah, finally got away from your MacBook eh Geffy?

Got away? Nope, still got the MacBook, just also have a MacBook Pro too now.

I can only see about 2.98GB of RAM I'm assuming because I have a 256MB GFx card + all the other stuff like USB, FireWire 400/800, etc.

Further to my warning about Boot Camping Windows it seems to be less of a problem on Mac Pro computers as they use more generic hardware, ie its easier to find 64bit drivers, than the MacBook ranges. So you may well be able to get XP/Vista 64bit going properly.