A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective

[SiliconAddict]

I've built my own PCs before. Explorer seems to crash on me all the time. Everything else is usually fine, except maybe certain apps that hog all my resources and slow my PC to a crawl, but Explorer (and not just IE, I use FireFox) seems very susceptible to errors. Most of the time it's pretty stable if I'm not trying to do too much with good hardware. But when it goes down, it really goes down. I've seen Blue Screens with software errors too, and a lot of data corruption out of nowhere for no reason. Plus, it's more difficult to install Win2000 on a 200GB hard drive than it should be. Even with on-board ATA/133.

Hmmm. I'm assuming you are speaking of explorer.exe windows GUI shell. To date I have never under 2000 and XP ever had a BSOD under those OS's from explorer. I don't know what you are doing but that shouldn't happen. When explorer crashes it will take down the GUI and then respawn it within 10-15 seconds. (I get impatient and simply spawn a new explorer process. *shrugs*

AS for Win2K on a 200GB drive. At work I'm sitting on a Seagate 200GB drive. I had zero problems with the install other then a bad hard drive out of the box that made me think I had to preformat it because Windows was being a PITA at formatting it. I loaded the Seagate utils and it came back clean. After 2 days of putzing around I exchanged it and bam. Flawless. Boot. Partition. Format. Install. Configure. Done.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Let me guess, you doubted his claims of stability?

My friends at college have easily left their XP boxes running for over 2-3 months. And they don't even keep it as clean as me (JV16 PowerTools/Spybot/Firefox). Anandtech's claims aren't that suprising, but if you choose to just shake your head and believe what you want to believe, that's your choice too.

I have in the last couple year of use NEVER crashed under XP (I do not count one instance since I was trying to shoehorn a driver into a video card and it wasn't being happy. I simply use the driver rollback option and I was back. I always play around with the drivers on my systems. That wasn't XP's fault. That was me for geeking on my puter. )

On 2000 I can count on 1 hand how many times I've crashed in the last 4 years. Again most of which goes back to drivers in 90% of those cases. Toggling between LCD, video out, line out, both LCD/video out, and all to fast caused my 2K box to BSOD. The onscreen error was obviously a video card drive .dll. I will never use Toshiba laptops ever again. They simply don't support their hardware but that is a different topic.
The fact is that 2K and XP are as stable as OS X. Period. What makes OS X better is dedicated drivers for its hardware but that can be a blessing and a curse. I know on my desktop I am continually getting better and better performance once a quarter with my aging GeForce 4 card because Nvidia is constantly updating their unified drivers package. Ditto with my Audigy card. Apple releases updates how often for their video cards? Do they ever update the other components of their systems?

 

[Nik_Doof]

Imho, there is a diffrence between BSOD crashes, unstable crashes, unusable crashes, and application crashes. I dont think they should be humped together and try to explain em all together like the article writer tried to do.

Let me step though them:

BSOD/Kernel Errors: them times where your working away and BOOM the OS crumbles below you, this in my experience 9/10 is hardware related, be dodgy drivers or bad hardware. I've had crashes on my XP machine due to bad memory, and the same on MacOSX, simple replacement fixed the problems

Unstable crashes: times when a application pokes somewhere its not supposed to and just sends a ripple of chaos though the system, nothing runs 100% until you give it a reboot, i've only experienced this on XP sofar.

Unusable crashes: this is where a application or summat dies and locks the system, had many of these on XP, and only 2-3 on OSX.

Application crashes: when nice little apps go bad, i get ALOT of these on OSX but thats due to running beta software or stuff thats just not ready for the prime time, XP is the same where you get a crash message, and the system is still running a-ok.

I wish the author would re-vist this and go over these findings in similar catagories, yes OSX crashes, but how many times has the system died due to it?

 

[solvs]

Hmmm. I'm assuming you are speaking of explorer.exe windows GUI shell. To date I have never under 2000 and XP ever had a BSOD under those OS's from explorer. I don't know what you are doing but that shouldn't happen. When explorer crashes it will take down the GUI and then respawn it within 10-15 seconds. (I get impatient and simply spawn a new explorer process. *shrugs*

AS for Win2K on a 200GB drive. At work I'm sitting on a Seagate 200GB drive. I had zero problems with the install other then a bad hard drive out of the box that made me think I had to preformat it because Windows was being a PITA at formatting it. I loaded the Seagate utils and it came back clean. After 2 days of putzing around I exchanged it and bam. Flawless. Boot. Partition. Format. Install. Configure. Done.

Explorer crashing and BSOD were 2 separate things. Sorry, should have been more clear. The Explorer crashes seem to be worse after I install WMP9. I've had nothing but trouble with that. Especially when it tries to play everything. Sometimes it just hangs, and I have to restart it, even when I'm not clicking a media file. The BSODs are pretty rare nowadays, but I still get some. One time I installed a security program, and some how it screwed something up. I had to reboot in Safe Mode and manually remove it. I couldn't uninstall it, because it said it wasn't installed properly and would BS at start-up. Ok, technically the programs fault, but it still pissed me off. Never said OS X was perfect. It has it's own issues. But Windows does piss me off on a regular occasion. At least I'm learning a lot.

The 200GB drive issue was a pain in the butt. It wouldn't recognize the onboard ATA/133, so I used a PCI card. Wouldn't recognize the driver, even from a floppy. Might have been in part to the fact that I was using a Win2000 CD, pre-service pack. I slip-streamed SP4 (which was an issue in itself) and created a new boot disk. Then I restored my files from a back up disk after all the updates. I got it working finally, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been. I know if I used XP it would have worked, but I used to have XP Pro at work, and didn't like it. My Mom has XP Home on her PC, and it's a PITA sometimes. I'm sticking with Win2000 for now, even if I still can't reinstall it because it says it can't find Windows when I restart.

That's why I had a backup drive, system and all. Even when the last time it said the paging file was too small. Finally got that working though too.

 

[ijimk]

The best web browsers out there period are firefox and safari period.

 

[Lancetx]

Here we go again

YES, I've built my own machine before. Many times. If I want a quick and dirty Linux server I'll go out and make my own. But everytime some pc user tries a Mac, I'm supposed to drop everything and listen to them like they're some Oracle or something? Gimme a break...

What is it with you and building your own machine? Are you on some quest or something? Do you enjoy arguing with Mac people because you know they can't build their own machines?

I agree wholeheartedly. I've built more than one Windows box in the past before myself and the entire experience is WAY overrated. I'm not a Mac user because I can't build my own PC, I'm a Mac user because I don't want to either build nor use a PC anymore.

 

[hob]

Jeez that was a long article... I have a coupla comments...

Ok, so I was a "hardcore" pc user, like the guy in the article... until about 18 months ago, when i got an iBook and quickly moved on to a PowerBook.

Similar to the author of the article, I was a little... dissapointed with the performance of my mac. It doesn't seem like you get as much (hardware) bang for your buck, but I do love the operating system.

Thing is, for the amount of money I've spent on Apple Laptops... well, the iBook would die every 2-3 months due to logic board problems, which was a massive PITA... And the Powerbook seems to be sinking in the corner right now, which I guess I'll have to get looked at sometime before the warranty expires...

I dunno, I prefer OS X wayyyy more than Windows XP... but on a well managed or well built PC, XP can be quite... good! Though it's just everything about OS X - it's much better thought out, I'd fully agree with all the things the author was saying about OS X vs XP...

Maybe I should buy a G5 too... oh wait, I don't have £1500... did he say he got it with educational discount? Apple should probably cap educational discount at £1000 - 'cos anyone who can afford to pay more than that for a computer sure ain't a student round here!!

Hob
(at uni)

 

[HiRez]

I found the guy refreshingly unbiased. I really did think he went into it with an open mind, no easy task when you're so used to one way of doing things. Even though I think OS X is vastly superior to Windoze, I imagine it's not all that obvious at first. As he correctly points out, it's the little things that make it better, the details. Most people writing reviews like this never get that far. I know if I started using Win XP every day, I'd find it very frustrating, not only because of its inferiority, but just because old habits are hard to break. And to be honest, I'd probably let my bias get the best of me and dump on it for some things it didn't really deserve. It's too bad he didn't get to some of the other great software like iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, iChatAV, Keynote, FCP, Xcode, and QuickTime Pro that are not even available on Windoze, but overall I say he did a good job on the review.

 

[MattG]

I use both Macs and PCs at work, and I'd be lying if I told you the PC crashes more than my Mac. My Windows XP SP2 laptop has been up for almost two weeks now without a reboot. I can't remember the last time I was able to keep my G5 up that long without having to reboot...

 

[HiRez]

I wish the author would re-vist this and go over these findings in similar catagories, yes OSX crashes, but how many times has the system died due to it?

He addressed that directly, when he said:

OS X is built on a very solid core and it does handle individual applications crashing much better than Windows does. I've never had to reboot the entire system because one application crashed.

 

[SkudShark]

Hey I know this is OT from thread, but drop me an email and a email addy I can rpely to if you still want that Ipod

 

[Lord Blackadder]

Overall a good article, I pretty much agree, except about being "out of luck" with any OS other than Windows.

lol, I think the author summed up what you've all been arguing about rather succinctly:

OS X crashes
Windows XP crashes
My G5 machine crashes a bit less than any of my Windows XP machines

That's my experience too. The 98 and ME days really turned me off to the Win OS entirely because they were horrifically unreliable and buggy. Recently we switched to XP at work and I am surprised at the stability it is possible to achieve with it (although 2000 seemed faster on our P4s). With that said, I think that OS X is slightly more stable. It clearly comes out ahead (to me) in customizability and integration of function. A very clean, well-designed UI.

But neither are idiot-proof! If I do something bone-headed I can screw my computer up, whether it be OS X, Windows.

 

[HiRez]

What I liked is that he talked about how Windows machines seem to get bogged down and confused when you throw too much stuff at them at once (The HD grinding is something which really bugs me on Windows machines.). This is also my experience. Win XP generally does fine when you're running a single app at a time. But when you want to really do some hardcore multitasking, things get dicey. On my now-old and lowly 800 MHz PowerBook, I regularly have something like this going: Cinema4D rendering a 3D sequence. Another C4D animation doc open in the foreground which I can work on at the same time. Photoshop & After Effects open. Safari open with lots of windows/tabs open. Mail, RBrowser, Address Book, iChat, and IcyJuice (ICQ client), Preview, Terminal, and BBEdit all open. Unison open and actively downloading files. iTunes playing music. Often I also have Xcode and Interface Builder open as well, just because I don't like to quit and restart them. Now with the full 3D renders, it can slow down a tiny bit since it always pegs the CPU at 100% but I find it amazing I can do all this at once, constantly switching apps, and so it all without a hitch, still getting work done on one thing while everything else is happening in the background, on a 3-year-old Mac laptop. With 768 MB RAM. It looks something like this:

I shudder to think what would happen if I tried that on Windows.

 

[bryanc]

Windows is 'good enough'...OS X is great.

I've heard this "if your Wintel Box is crashing a lot, you've either got bad hardware or you're an idiot who can't maintain a system properly" line a lot since switching to OS X and commenting on how much more stable it is than my PCs.

I don't think that's the whole story. My PCs are built from good components, and I've been using computers since 1968 and I really do know what I'm doing. So I don't think crashes are often due to incompetence on my part or crappy hardware. To be fair, my PCs don't crash as much as they used to, but they almost never crash under Linux, and they *do* crash under Windows (less under 2000 than XP). But the most revealing aspect of the crashing behaviour of my PCs is that they're generally stable if they're not working that hard...it's when I start taxing them (deconvolution of big datasets, for example) that they'll generally crap out.

What I love about my Macs is that, whatever I throw at them, they'll keep running, and if I realize that some task is going to take half-of-forever, I can kill it without destabilizing my system.

So for the secretary running Word, or the casual web-surfer or gamer, a PC running windows is good enough (although, IMHO, a mac would be better). But for someone who really needs a modern computer, OS X is vastly superior to Windows, and, IMHO, somewhat better than other variants of Unix currently available.

Cheers

 

[AdamR01]

But the most revealing aspect of the crashing behaviour of my PCs is that they're generally stable if they're not working that hard...it's when I start taxing them (deconvolution of big datasets, for example) that they'll generally crap out.

Heat issues possibly?

 

[cb911]

well, looks like this article was posted before. but it seems to have spawned some more conversation this time around as well.

one thing i somehow found funny:

For whatever reason, this process is quite CPU intensive, making the G5's fans spin up if you drag an image for too long. With two CPUs, however, it's not really invasive, but it's just interesting to hear fans spin up while you're dragging an image around.

he he. whoa! don't drag those images for too long! the poor little dual-G5 might not be able to handle it!

i just tried dragging, and holding some pics from Safari on my PB, and it didn't bring the fan on. what would cause the G5's to do this?

and i'm sure we can all vouch for OS X's amazing ability to multi-task. i never realise quite how good OS X handles that until i look at a Windows box.


@ SkudShark - you want to give me an iPod? sure, i can always use another one. email on the way.