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waiting for my first mac

H

homer9d

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Let me first say that I am a newbie to macs but some of my friends have them and told me to get one before I get out of college. Well the time has come and I just ordered the 2GHz dual processor G5 with the ATI 9600 128mb ram 😀 Most of my friends that do have macs have also told me that os x is much more stable than win xp. I hope this is true cause my home built computer has been crashing quite a bit recently and it is very hard to type up lab papers with that happening. I was wondering first off though, how long does it usually take for Apple to ship their G5's, I ordered mine on Tuesday? Secondly, I was wondering if the Apple care plan is worth the extra money?

Thanks 🙂
 
First your 2.0 shouldn't take too long to get to you. The 2.5's are the ones that are taking a long time to get delivered. As for crashes, I use a mac daily and a PC daily and lets just say this, in the lab of 30 computers I use, on average we have at least 3 computers with viruses, at least 3 that are randomly not working and the remaining computers usually crash every other day. On my mac it would be rare to see a crash once in an entire month of 100% uptime. It looks like you ordered an awesome system make sure you have at least 1Gb of RAM. As for applecare some will say it is worth it some will say not but it is nice to have that peace of mind so I would say yes get it.
 
ha. . . yeah os x is more stable than xp. . . thats the biggest understatement of the year. my friend just got a brand new 2.4ghz dell laptop and i was using my rev A PB (867mhz) and he commented on how much faster and better my OS was b/c his crashed at least 3 times in 2 hours(granted it was a brand new xp set up so only 3 times in a couple of hours isnt that frequent). so yeah, you should thuroughly enjoy your new mac! welcome!!!
 
Getting used to it - it's pretty great

I can't speak about WinXP as I've never run it. But Win2K was pretty darned stable. OSX 10.3 ("Panther") is also pretty darned stable.

However, on an AthlonXP 2400+ (2GHz) with 512megs of RAM, Win2K takes about 3-4 minutes just to boot. On a PowerMac dual 1.25GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM MacOS X 10.3 boots in maybe 1 minute 30. OSX also "feels" faster when running multiple programs at the same time -- I notice no lag or slowdown in anything. It was also much easier to setup networking in OSX (it did it all automatically -- Win2K needed me to tell it my workgroup name, etc).

So did you make the right choice? I'd say yes. Will you be happy with your purchase? That depends on you. There ARE many things that work differently on MacOS than in Windows. But I've only been using Mac for about 4 months now and I feel fairly comfortable with it already. It took me at least that long to become familiar with Windows when I first started using it (back in 1994, then I didn't use it again until 2001).
 
Thanks for the replies 🙂 I can't wait to get the G5, I just bought Battlefield 1942 for it so I can play on the network with my roommates. I unfortunately did not get a gig of ram with it, only the 512 that was standard. I was wondering though if I could use the OCZ pc3200 ram out of my pc instead of buying it from Apple? It is 2x512 sticks for dual channel.
 
homer9d said:
Thanks for the replies 🙂 I can't wait to get the G5, I just bought Battlefield 1942 for it so I can play on the network with my roommates. I unfortunately did not get a gig of ram with it, only the 512 that was standard. I was wondering though if I could use the OCZ pc3200 ram out of my pc instead of buying it from Apple? It is 2x512 sticks for dual channel.
Click to expand...
500th post! w00t^10!!!!!
oh yeah, staying ot...the g5 uses pc3200 so you should be able to use it if it's a 512MB stick
 
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