OS X slower than Windows

[bcharm]

On equivalent hardware OS X is slower than Windows. We all know this, but no one's ever explained why. What is it about OS X that's slowing it down, and what does Apple have to do it speed it up so that it's as quick and responsive as Windows?

It's not that big of a deal to me since I love the whole Mac user experience, but my sis who switched is always complaining and asking why Macs are so slow. I'm starting to wonder why too.

[revenuee]

Originally posted by bcharm
On equivalent hardware OS X is slower than Windows. We all know this, but no one's ever explained why. What is it about OS X that's slowing it down, and what does Apple have to do it speed it up so that it's as quick and responsive as Windows?

It's not that big of a deal to me since I love the whole Mac user experience, but my sis who switched is always complaining and asking why Macs are so slow. I'm starting to wonder why too.

What is it about the OS this is slow?
and do you have enough Ram?

[Dont Hurt Me]

im not sure what you mean by equivalent hardware ? we have been stuck on G4 running less then equivalent hardware, i would dare say os x is very fast on a new dual 2gig. the sad truth is all the hardware is slow so until the hardware matches the windows world i wouldnt do a comparison( unless you have a new duallies.

[strider42]

I've had two brand new computers here at work running XP, and I would call them anything but quick and responsive.

What hardware are you talking about. If its older stuff that doesn't support quartz extreme, thats your answer right there.

The interface probably could be a bit snappier, and that affects perceived speed, but thats not the same as actual speed. I've read a lot that says multitasking in OS X is better than XP, and my experience in XP would back that up.

[joshuwa72]

I dont think OS X is "slower"...but it does have quite a few dazzling effects, such as genie and all the other animations and fades going on.

While that dosnt slow the OS down, a genied window takes longer to get down than a minimized XP window just because of what its doing.

That can make it "feel" less responisve and less "right now!" feeling...but OS X on my new mac definetly blows my pc away.

[leet1]

Those fancy things you see in the GUI of a mac are slowing it down probably, just turn some of them off. XP is snappier still though, but turning off some of the GUI things may speed things up for you.

[bousozoku]

If you're talking equivalently-priced hardware, it's somewhat understandable. A 1 GHz G4 iMac doesn't compete for speed with a 2.8 GHz P4 Windows machine.

Of course, if you're talking about the visual elements, they can be adjusted. Go into Dock preferences and change Genie effect to Scale effect. Turn off magnification and Animate opening applications. This will make the system seem faster and that usually has more to do with the speed problem than actual speed.

[mj_1903]

My 1ghz PowerBook running Panther is much more snappy, responsive and in some cases powerful than my friends Win XP Pro 3ghz P4.

But thats just his and my feelings, he recently switched because of them.

[Rower_CPU]

The single greatest thing you can do to improve XP is to turn it back to the "classic" (win2k) theme. Turn off the Fisher Price™ GUI and go back to something usable.

[Flickta]

Yes, X is slower than XP.
But then again it has more eye-candy...
The problem is that Apple did not think about low-end users (My PB G4 800 for instance)... Or it's just NEXT style... With its early incarnations interface at least.

[Dippo]

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
The single greatest thing you can do to improve XP is to turn it back to the "classic" (win2k) theme. Turn off the Fisher Price™ GUI and go back to something usable.

That certianly helps things but that gray color is SO UGLY!

What would be even better is just go back to Windows 2000, it is faster than XP.

[Dippo]

Actually Windows 95 ran fine on my 486 running at 66Mhz, just think of how fast it would run on my 1.75Ghz Athlon!

Of course it would blue screen every 10 minutes, but that's the sacrafices we must make for speed :)

[Rower_CPU]

Originally posted by Dippo
That certianly helps things but that gray color is SO UGLY!

IMO, it's still an improvement. ;)

[markjones05]

Panther is not slower than xp. Im running panther on my dual 1ghz g4 and it is just as snappy and responsive as a 2. whatever ghz machine with xp on it. i really have no idea what you guys are talking about.

[revenuee]

Originally posted by Flickta
Yes, X is slower than XP.
But then again it has more eye-candy...
The problem is that Apple did not think about low-end users (My PB G4 800 for instance)... Or it's just NEXT style... With its early incarnations interface at least.

Thinks *low end mac at 800?* then looks at own machine and sighs (G4 400) - i guess getting Panther will be like shooting myself in the foot ... kinda like my feeling with getting OS 10 in general

[BaDBoY]

thats very strange... i have a G4 450 mhz. the oldest G4.. one of the first that came out. i installed panther on it... it feels like a whole brand new computer. its is MUCH faster than jaguar... and the overall speed had a boost. X may be slower than XP but everything intergrated into OSX is much better than any windows version in my perspective

[revenuee]

Originally posted by BaDBoY
thats very strange... i have a G4 450 mhz. the oldest G4.. one of the first that came out. i installed panther on it... it feels like a whole brand new computer. its is MUCH faster than jaguar... and the overall speed had a boost. X may be slower than XP but everything intergrated into OSX is much better than any windows version in my perspective

an improvement eh? maybe i will consider it after all... they have for 120 CND at my school bookstore, maybe i'll pick it up

[Phazer80s]

Originally posted by revenuee
an improvement eh? maybe i will consider it after all... they have for 120 CND at my school bookstore, maybe i'll pick it up

revenuee: you should buy it. You'll probably be quite impressed.

On my 733, Panther's scrolling isn't much better than the latest release of Jaguar. Also, window resizing is still quite poor; the redraw stutter makes the windows feel like they're made of lead. *BUT* button and menu responsiveness seem to be at about 90% of their levels in OS 9. That added responsiveness really makes a world of difference. To me, the speed of Panther's GUI makes the OS X experience much more enjoyable than ever before. Buy it!

[x86isslow]

at our school, we have 9,2; xp; x, and x blows the other two outta the water.

well the time spent in [fruitless] navigation in winblowz kinda offsets gains from the perceived snappiness.

[Phazer80s]

Originally posted by x86isslow
at our school, we have 9,2; xp; x, and x blows the other two outta the water.

well the time spent in [fruitless] navigation in winblowz kinda offsets gains from the perceived snappiness.

And a great point, too! :)

[bcharm]

It's not a question about hardware (my sis has her iBook's RAM maxed out). I'm comparing similarly powered mac to a PC (not MHz to MHz). Windows' UI is more responsive, no lag, and I'm not talking about the animations in OS X.

Where I noticed it the most when comparing to Windows is while surfing the web, or scrolling down a webpage. (I use Camino and Safari) But I also notice it in the Finder. So are the real problems with the applications, or are there optimizations needed in the OS itself?

[revenuee]

Originally posted by bcharm
It's not a question about hardware (my sis has her iBook's RAM maxed out). I'm comparing similarly powered mac to a PC (not MHz to MHz). Windows' UI is more responsive, no lag, and I'm not talking about the animations in OS X.

Where I noticed it the most when comparing to Windows is while surfing the web, or scrolling down a webpage. (I use Camino and Safari) But I also notice it in the Finder. So are the real problems with the applications, or are there optimizations needed in the OS itself?

well one thing about safari i noticed is that rather then loading the images and information as they come, it pre-loads a significant portion of the website before it displays, that made it seem slower to me.. even compared to internet explorer on the same computer.

i don't have an relative feeling toward scolling.

However, a simular powered computer... if your not comparing MHZ, and not comparing RAM, then what, bench marks? loading images in photoshop?

What applications are you talking in particualr?

iMOVIE and iPhoto?

everyone here knows there slow, there not really meant for heavy lifting, they are just kinda fun. ... i havn't touched any of the iLife apps, with the exeption of iTunes since i got the new OS... LOL

[jxyama]

here is some good info on this topic...

Ars Technica review of Panther (section 5) (http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/panther/macosx-10.3-5.html)

some choice quotes:

Panther is faster than Jaguar. There are a few ways to look at this. First, there's the boring, old world of numerical performance. You know, benchmarks and all that jazz. [...] But "perceived performance" is where Mac OS X has always suffered. As far as the user experience is concerned, if it "feels slow," it is slow. Panther has improved here as well.

Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release — and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems. It certainly didn't apply to classic Mac OS, where every significant new OS version was perceptibly slower than its predecessor on the same hardware. (Yes, System 7 and Mac OS 8, I'm looking at you.) The world of Windows follows a similar trend. It is usually taken for granted that a shiny new OS will not really sing until you upgrade your hardware.

Now for a sobering dose of perspective. While Panther is indeed faster than Jaguar on the same hardware, it is still not nearly fast enough in many areas. Those darned cobwebs have not been fully excised from Panther. Window manipulation in particular still sometimes pauses, stutters, and generally lags behind my mental state.

i think the last part is a very common complaint from Windows/OS 9 users...

[Foxer]

My office has new (within six months) Compaqs with 1.8ghz p4's running XP professional. These things are soooo slow. Both my powerbook and powermac are faster, but so was my wife's eMac, running at 1ghz.

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bcharm
It's not a question about hardware (my sis has her iBook's RAM maxed out). I'm comparing similarly powered mac to a PC (not MHz to MHz). Windows' UI is more responsive, no lag, and I'm not talking about the animations in OS X.

Where I noticed it the most when comparing to Windows is while surfing the web, or scrolling down a webpage. (I use Camino and Safari) But I also notice it in the Finder. So are the real problems with the applications, or are there optimizations needed in the OS itself?

Well, some of things that you are noticing are part of a few problems.

1. The compiler that they are using is not really designed/optimized for the PowerPC chip, and even after a few years of work GCC (the compiler) is still problematic in terms of optimization. Expect this to be resolved with further revisions or a switch to XLC (IBM Compiler).

2. The windowing system in OS X is very advanced technically, but it also lags. It definitely needs to be worked on.

If you look at Jaguar vs Panther, the startup time is something they obviously work a lot on, because compared to Jaguar I can start up cold (no reboot) and be loging-in in under 25 seconds (compared to minutes on Jag). So I definitly feel that a HUGE boost in UI speed is definitely possible and will hapen.

One of the things that makes XP so fast in the UI is that 1.They have a superior compiler, 2. GDI has been around for a long long time and is optimized to death. 3. They aren't really doing advanced compositing like anti-aliasing, interpolation, double-buffering, per-pixel transparency (most of which is being still done on the CPU in Jag/Panther). 4. I heard somewhere that XP uses the Graphics card to speed up text rendering.

Also remember that the BSD subsystem and Mach to an extent is very fast, its just the things that you end up seeing that are so slow. This IMO is one of the last things that Apple needs to do to finally hit every nail down that is still sticking up.

Also, if you are using MS Office, try deleting the "Microsoft Database Daemon" file in the Office folder. I found out it was on while using Office and pegged my CPU at 40%!!! Killing that things sped things up pretty well.

[ITR 81]

Hell when I compared Xp to OS X and my friends did they said OS X is alot faster then XP and they had new Dell LP.
The only reason OS X slows down is because the OS eats up memory.

But I would never get Xp because it's just not good OS. W2K is still better IMO. When I worked in the mil. new Dell Xp Pro machines crashed atleast once a week. To me it was just headache.

[bousozoku]

Fukui:

It's hard to believe that Microsoft's compiler is better than anyone else's but gcc is such a mess, it's surprising that it (they) generates code every time.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention this, but with Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel because the graphics performance was so incredibly slow. At that point in time, it meant that most any graphical glitch crashed the system, but has apparently be resolved somewhat. I have my doubts as to whether Microsoft would have gone for stability and moved the graphics subsystem out of the kernel.

Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine. :eek:

[leet1]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine. :eek: [/B]

Sorry, but I find it hard to believe<not saying your lieing> but my old 1ghz athlon pc running xp pro with 512megs runs xp with all the effects just fine.....Maybe my desktop is just a fluke....How could it not be usable without turning off the sliding animation?

[AdamR01]

Anyone that says Windows XP runs slow on their new computer either has a bunch of OEM crap software installed or something is seriously hosed. Windows XP ran fine on my Celeron 600MHz and 384mb of Ram. I now have a 1GHz P3 and it runs about the same in the gui. I have friends with Celerons and as little as 128mb of ram and it runs decently. Its no speed demon, but its certainly not unusable and its just fine if you turn off some of the eye candy.

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by leet1
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe<not saying your lieing> but my old 1ghz athlon pc running xp pro with 512megs runs xp with all the effects just fine.....Maybe my desktop is just a fluke....How could it not be usable without turning off the sliding animation?

It was taking 5 - 15 seconds to display menus because of the animation. You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards. Even Apple has not sold those since the early G4s.

Try using WinXP when the start menu, the pull down menus, and the popup menus take a very long time to work.

[AdamR01]

My Celeron 600 had a Voodoo 3 PCI...

[leet1]

Originally posted by bousozoku
You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards.

TNT2 with 32 megs better? I don't know that card.

[AdamR01]

Originally posted by bousozoku
You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards.

I dont know of any companies that sell Rage 128s in new computers any more or that have in a long time. Most business computers would have integrated Intel graphics I would think.

[markjones05]

Originally posted by Foxer
My office has new (within six months) Compaqs with 1.8ghz p4's running XP professional. These things are soooo slow. Both my powerbook and powermac are faster, but so was my wife's eMac, running at 1ghz.

You have to remember that a 1ghz mac is roughly equal to a 2ghz pentium pc.

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by AdamR01
I dont know of any companies that sell Rage 128s in new computers any more or that have in a long time. Most business computers would have integrated Intel graphics I would think.

These were new machines in March 2003.

[AdamR01]

Really?? Thats interesting. I dont think Windows uses much hardware acceleration for the drawing though (not like quartz extreme anyways). I remember my Dad's HP with Windows 98 was slow as hell untill we ran msconfig and disabled a bunch of the crap that ran at start up.

[bousozoku]

I went to the HP website a little while ago and looked at PCs under small/medium business equipment.

They have machines there starting for $359 (I think it was) with onboard Intel video. The step up now has GeForce 4MX as the first option, so they've apparently gone away from the ATI boards since 8 months ago. Maybe that should clear out their complaint desk. ;)

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Fukui:
I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention this, but with Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel because the graphics performance was so incredibly slow.
Yea, I heard this, but wasn't sure.

[Powerbook G5]

In my experience, running 10.2.8/10.3.1 on my 1.25 GHz G4 has been a lot faster than running XP on the 2.8 GHz Dell at home.

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Fukui:

It's hard to believe that Microsoft's compiler is better than anyone else's but gcc is such a mess, it's surprising that it (they) generates code every time.


Well, I meant superior to GCC, not to every other one.

FWIW, my friend last year bought a 1599 Dell Laptop with 1.8 Ghz P4 and Geforce 2MX. When he tried to access the "All Programs" menu in the Start Menu and it took on average a two or three seconds to display, so VMMV! Not everyone has the exact same experience....

[AdamR01]

But everyone that said it was slow hasnt said if they had a bunch of oem crap running in the background. You arent going to have a good experience if you do. I work at a computer store and every time i work it seems like someone brought in their computer because it is slow. Then the stores charges $50 for me to run msconfig :D .

[Foxer]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine. :eek: [/B]

Yeah. There is a awful hang time when laucnching programs or bringing up the "start" menu. Maybe not 4-5 seconds, but very noticable. I'm sure, being an office situation, that our video cards are part of the problem.

Doesn't bother me, though. I just feel better about my Macs when I get home.

[lucab1982]

Originally posted by Flickta
Yes, X is slower than XP.
The problem is that Apple did not think about low-end users (My PB G4 800 for instance)

pbook 800 dvi, 1gb, 5400rpm hd.

Panther is way faster on my same powerbook.

Even a G4 cube at home is faster with panther rather than jaguar.

I was close to upgrading and waited till i installed panther and wow! :D

i'll be happy to pay the upgrade each year if the improvements are this good.

[bcharm]

Originally posted by Fukui
Well, some of things that you are noticing are part of a few problems.

1. The compiler that they are using is not really designed/optimized for the PowerPC chip, and even after a few years of work GCC (the compiler) is still problematic in terms of optimization. Expect this to be resolved with further revisions or a switch to XLC (IBM Compiler).

2. The windowing system in OS X is very advanced technically, but it also lags. It definitely needs to be worked on.

One of the things that makes XP so fast in the UI is that 1.They have a superior compiler, 2. GDI has been around for a long long time and is optimized to death.

3. They aren't really doing advanced compositing like anti-aliasing, interpolation, double-buffering, per-pixel transparency (most of which is being still done on the CPU in Jag/Panther). 4. I heard somewhere that XP uses the Graphics card to speed up text rendering.

Also remember that the BSD subsystem and Mach to an extent is very fast, its just the things that you end up seeing that are so slow. This IMO is one of the last things that Apple needs to do to finally hit every nail down that is still sticking up.

Also, if you are using MS Office, try deleting the "Microsoft Database Daemon" file in the Office folder. I found out it was on while using Office and pegged my CPU at 40%!!! Killing that things sped things up pretty well.

Thanks Fukui. That's exactly what I wanted to know. And thanks for the MS Office tip. I'll take a look on my sis's iBook when she comes back for Thanksgiving. =)

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bcharm
Thanks Fukui. That's exactly what I wanted to know. And thanks for the MS Office tip. I'll take a look on my sis's iBook when she comes back for Thanksgiving. =)
No problem.

That Database thing, really was what was slowing my G/F's iBook to death. I was using Word, and noticed immediately that everything started to crawl.So I used top and found out that there were two Microsoft PIDs running. So I killed the other one, and then trashed it. And then Boom, it was like a whole new laptop! Smooth scrolling was actually smooth now...

BTW, the daemon is used to scan your lan for other MS Office installations, I don't know why that requires 40-60% of my CPU???:rolleyes:

[bousozoku]

That's almost funny.

I used to install MS Office 97 on various Windows PCs at one place where I worked. The installation included a complimentary (read compulsory) help application called fastfind.

This would slow down the whole system as it was constantly indexing the contents of the hard drive. We always deleted the shortcut from the startup folder just so that the systems didn't spend a large percentage of the processing power and disk speed on it.

Your MS Office Intellisense at work. :rolleyes:

[Backtothemac]

Well, I just sold a 2.6GHZ Hyperthreaded PIV Dell. I am now on an iMac 500 MHZ G3. This thing has 320 MB Ram. The Dell had 256MB DDR 400. Panther feels faster than XP did. Especially in windows that have many files in them. Also, my start menu was huge. Even with a 256MB Video card, it would hang for about two seconds before the menu was visible.

Dock animation is smooth, so is genie on everything except iPhoto, and iTunes.

[leet1]

Backtothemac,

It had to be the settings. Theres a setting for delay of appearance of the menus.


Theres no reason for it to be slow on a system like that.

[Nermal]

My 800 MHz iBook with Jaguar felt faster than my dad's Athlon 1700. I've since paid my NZ$155 for Panther, and don't see much of a performance improvement, although it's still faster than the Athlon of course :)

[Backtothemac]

Originally posted by leet1
Backtothemac,

It had to be the settings. Theres a setting for delay of appearance of the menus.


Theres no reason for it to be slow on a system like that.

I had tweak XP running with no delay on the windows. I have seen it on some XP systems, and not on others.

[Striderdm1]

Originally posted by bcharm
On equivalent hardware OS X is slower than Windows. We all know this, but no one's ever explained why. What is it about OS X that's slowing it down, and what does Apple have to do it speed it up so that it's as quick and responsive as Windows?

It's not that big of a deal to me since I love the whole Mac user experience, but my sis who switched is always complaining and asking why Macs are so slow. I'm starting to wonder why too.

maybe on your mac, but NOT here.. ! MacOSX runs as i'd expect and Panther is better than anything i've used previously.

have u enough ram? 512mb is the bare min imho, i'd always recomend 1gig min. I have 1.5gig here

Wot s/w are you trying to run?

[TheFish]

ive upgraded to panther on an 800mhz 17" imac and panther dosnt seem any more responsive to me, widnows cant even keep up with the mouse when you are reisizing them heres an example http://www.xvsxp.com/general/#responsiveness

[Striderdm1]

Originally posted by TheFish
ive upgraded to panther on an 800mhz 17" imac and panther dosnt seem any more responsive to me, widnows cant even keep up with the mouse when you are reisizing them heres an example http://www.xvsxp.com/general/#responsiveness

Wow !

that is bad - our iBook running at 700mhz G3 isn't like this. Sure, it's nothing compared to my dual G5 - but it is also nothing like them examples from the link! :eek:

There is something way wrong with any mac > than this iBook here and that includes your iMac that should feel twice as good imho.

Use Activity Monitor to see if there's anything grabbing all the cpu speed or if there's just something running that shouldn't be. Is the gfx card drivers upto date? How's your ram? What 3rd party software is loaded - i had norton DD, anti virus and personal firewall3 enabled and these SLOWED my G5 down.

I've removed all norton stuff and got a speed boost! I now use virex and Netbarrier..

Seriously, there is something really wrong there - in every respect your iMac is superior to this iBook. But this iBook does NOT perform anywhere near any of those examples in the link! Straight up.

A re-install AND a CLEAN install of Panther? Do a system check too - on the G5 i reboot with the OPTION key held down. I dunno if it's the same for the iMac..?

HTH? But i hope u get sorted - you shouldn't have any Mac that's better than this iBook performing worse iyswim

Good luck!

[Fukui]

Originally posted by TheFish
ive upgraded to panther on an 800mhz 17" imac and panther dosnt seem any more responsive to me, widnows cant even keep up with the mouse when you are reisizing them heres an example http://www.xvsxp.com/general/#responsiveness
If you read my post above, you would see why. The guy though, didn't really go into why its slow (the visual effects that are being proccessed on OSX etc.), but yea, that article basically reflects the state of things right now, in terms of UI speed.

[~Shard~]

Originally posted by joshuwa72
I dont think OS X is "slower"...but it does have quite a few dazzling effects, such as genie and all the other animations and fades going on.

While that dosnt slow the OS down, a genied window takes longer to get down than a minimized XP window just because of what its doing.

That can make it "feel" less responisve and less "right now!" feeling...but OS X on my new mac definetly blows my pc away.

I agree - I think lots of the time it's people's PERCEPTION of speed, due to how certain tasks appear or are animated in the OS. OSX does a few more flashy things, which does indeed lead to a perceived slower response than Windows in some cases. But when it comes down to what's important, i.e. execution time, multitasking, etc., I believe OSX will outperform Windows from a performance point of view pretty much every time. If I'm incorrect, by all means, correct me. ;)

[Striderdm1]

Originally posted by ~Shard~
I agree - I think lots of the time it's people's PERCEPTION of speed, due to how certain tasks appear or are animated in the OS. OSX does a few more flashy things, which does indeed lead to a perceived slower response than Windows in some cases. But when it comes down to what's important, i.e. execution time, multitasking, etc., I believe OSX will outperform Windows from a performance point of view pretty much every time. If I'm incorrect, by all means, correct me. ;)

I use both systems, and osx is far far far superior - we just have less games! :cool:

[leet1]

Originally posted by Striderdm1
I use both systems, and osx is far far far superior - we just have less games! :cool:


osx will be far far far superior when

1. its user base equals that of windows
2. cost go down on the machines it is on or its able to be installed on more than just apples machines
3. it has just as many games as windows


:p :p :p

[~Shard~]

Originally posted by leet1
osx will be far far far superior when

1. its user base equals that of windows
2. cost go down on the machines it is on or its able to be installed on more than just apples machines
3. it has just as many games as windows


:p :p :p

I will reply to this as if you were serious, even though I know you weren't. It'll reinforce what you said, and will be more fun that way.... ;)

Ahem, begin sarcasm...

So, let me get this straight. For an Operating System to be superior to another Operating System, the stability, ease of use, kernel, amount of code (i.e. if it's bloatware or not) and overall architecture don't matter at all. Okay, gotcha. :rolleyes:

And conversely, a good Operating System has nothing to do with the operating system itself but how many people decide to use it, if companies decide to make games for it, and the cost of the machines they run on (let's not get into the whole Apple cost vs. PC cost debate again!), which essentially means superior SOFTWARE (the OS) is dependant on the cost of the HARDWARE. Okay, that makes total sense. :rolleyes:

So I guess this means Windows is the best OS in the world then. It has lots of games, (which is the most important factor when selecting an OS!), the hardware it runs on is cheap (in more ways than one - you get what you pay for) and it has a lot of people using it. Yah, nevermind that new Windows version require more and more system requiremenets, get bigger and bigger and slower and slower. That's much better than an OS like OSX that gets more efficient than it's previous versions and make old systems run faster. :rolleyes:

Kay, thanks for letting me get all the sarcasm out of my system for the next week - I really enjoyed that. :cool:

[Striderdm1]

Originally posted by leet1
osx will be far far far superior when

1. its user base equals that of windows
2. cost go down on the machines it is on or its able to be installed on more than just apples machines
3. it has just as many games as windows

:p :p :p

:p :D :D I think ~Shard~ gives a far far far better reply than i ever could! :p

[zellin]

I'm sorry, but anyone who says that Windows is faster than OS X has no idea what he/she is talking about. Maybe "Comparable" doesn't mean what it used to mean...

[daveL]

Regardless of how long it takes to redraw a window or display a menu, I find it always takes several more steps to do anything in XP, compared to OS X. So OS X always "works" faster, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm on a "slow" 1GHz TiBook (my wife has a 1.8 GHz XP box).

Then there's the issue of running multiple apps, which is seriously better on OS X.

All in all, I see no contest: OS X wins hands down.

[~Shard~]

Originally posted by daveL
Regardless of how long it takes to redraw a window or display a menu, I find it always takes several more steps to do anything in XP, compared to OS X. So OS X always "works" faster, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm on a "slow" 1GHz TiBook (my wife has a 1.8 GHz XP box).

Yes, I agree, I think this is a huge factor as well. Not only does OSX technically perform faster from a sheer performance point of view, but the ease of use allows users to complete tasks faster and "work" faster, thereby effectively increasing the speed and efficiency of the OS as well. Hmm, what a novel concept for an OS! ;)