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iMac 20" or a PC?
- Thread starter paetrick
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That never seems to throw people off. You'd think more people would realise this.
I haven't read the rest of the thread (but I have a pretty good idea of what the responses are!) and I will whole-heartedly say go for a 20" iMac. I was thinking of building another PC with the money I saved to buy a 20" iMac but after playing with iMac for the past fortnight, I am sold on it. Best decision I've made with computers.
What motherboard did you buy? What chipset? I don't think it was Intel, from the sounds of it not nVidia either. I'd go with SiS, Via or possibly ATi.
You probably went on the cheap and bought an ultra cheap motherboard which caused all your trouble. Don't blame windows for that. You'd have had the same problems in Linux or hackintosh.
Basically the hardware failed, not windows. Point the blame where it should be pointed.
If you buy a laptop with the exact same hardware as apples, intel cpu + chipset + good nvidia/ati graphics card, then you'll have no problems whatsoever with windows (and if you did, you'd have the same trouble in OSX or Linux or Unix or BeOS).
Is the design of the machine important to you? Do you want to look at something beautiful while doing your stuff on your computer?
Is the design of the os important to you? Do you want to look at something beautiful while doing your stuff on your computer?
If both answers are no get the pc and enjoy windows fisher price style ui.
Is the design of the os important to you? Do you want to look at something beautiful while doing your stuff on your computer?
If both answers are no get the pc and enjoy windows fisher price style ui.
iMac or PC?
That's like asking "would you prefer to live or die"?
No really much of a choice, is it? ....
That's like asking "would you prefer to live or die"?
No really much of a choice, is it? ....
It was a DFI Lanparty board, and has been rock solid for years. It should be for £100 three years ago, but I can't complain about it at all! It's only Windows XP that got messed up and let me down because Windows XP throws a wobbler every time I try to connect a new USB device to it following a massive crash. All USB devices I set up before the crash work fine, it's just new ones that don't work.
SO I THINK I CAN BLAME WINDOWS THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
Yes but then again you have to factor in whether it is worth spending the extra if it is not needed. You can buy a motherboard for 100 or 150 say. The 150 board might not be any better for you, both might have the same chipset but the more expensive version may have firewire, etc.. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean you should buy it.
Thus the machine should be perfectly stable after a reinstall. Is it?
EDIT: The lanparty is a nForce based board isn't it? (Would be useful if you'd given me the chipset info aswell).
Did you update the bios in the time you had it? This could break USB functionality.
Did you install new nforce drivers? This could break USB too. The IDE driver for nForce has been known to corrupt windows. This would have broken Linux or OSX just the same.
Did you overclock the board/cpu/memory/graphics card? This could inadvertently break windows, just as it would cause damage to OSX or Linux. This could also break USB.
nForce boards have been known to have issues with drivers, IDE, SATA, and USB.
What specifically shows that this is a windows issue and not a driver, bios or overclocking problem?
As far as the upgradability angle is concerned, ask yourself honestly, do you REALLY expect to upgrade the machine in the future?
For some of you, yes, absolutely. You'll want to rip out the existing video card, say, in a year or two when the latest and greatest comes out so you can player the latest games. Or, you download a LOT and fill up your hard drives really quickly and want it all to be available on your primary drive. You know your reasons.
In my experience when I was building PC's I always had intentions to upgrade later, but I found that I never really did. I'd buy a nice motherboard, and a reasonable CPU to go with it, thinking that in a few years I could just drop a new, faster chip into it. Or I'd stick with the motherboard's on-board sound for now, but I can always buy a Sound Blaster card later and drop it in. Or I expected to buy a Firewire card for video editing.
What I found was that by the time I was ready to upgrade, inevitably the latest-and-greatest had shown up and made my whole machine obsolete anyway. For example, I'd buy a Slot 1 Celeron chip with the intention of upgrading later to a real Pentium, but by then, everything was socket 370. Same with the Athlon machine -- I bought a Slot A CPU to start, but by the time I was ready to upgrade, the industry had moved to Socket A. It was more worthwhile for me to buy a new motherboard to support any new chip, but that meant I had to buy new RAM, and so on... You might as well just buy a whole new machine at that point.
Keep in mind too that half the time I upgraded was because I was dissatisfied with the performance of something. I've concluded that if you get yourself a good machine that runs well from the start (i.e. no compromises thinking, "well, I'll fix it later") you'll be much happier.
What else would you want to add on, anyway, that a machine like the iMac doesn't already have built-in? Firewire's built in. Sound is built in. Bluetooth is built in. Most other things are available to plug in via USB, like TV tuners or hard drives.
In short, you might be surprised how little upgrading you actually do once you settle on a machine that "Just Works". By the time you're truly dissatisfied with the performance of your current iMac, the latest-and-greatest will blow it out of the water, and for probably half the price.
For some of you, yes, absolutely. You'll want to rip out the existing video card, say, in a year or two when the latest and greatest comes out so you can player the latest games. Or, you download a LOT and fill up your hard drives really quickly and want it all to be available on your primary drive. You know your reasons.
In my experience when I was building PC's I always had intentions to upgrade later, but I found that I never really did. I'd buy a nice motherboard, and a reasonable CPU to go with it, thinking that in a few years I could just drop a new, faster chip into it. Or I'd stick with the motherboard's on-board sound for now, but I can always buy a Sound Blaster card later and drop it in. Or I expected to buy a Firewire card for video editing.
What I found was that by the time I was ready to upgrade, inevitably the latest-and-greatest had shown up and made my whole machine obsolete anyway. For example, I'd buy a Slot 1 Celeron chip with the intention of upgrading later to a real Pentium, but by then, everything was socket 370. Same with the Athlon machine -- I bought a Slot A CPU to start, but by the time I was ready to upgrade, the industry had moved to Socket A. It was more worthwhile for me to buy a new motherboard to support any new chip, but that meant I had to buy new RAM, and so on... You might as well just buy a whole new machine at that point.
Keep in mind too that half the time I upgraded was because I was dissatisfied with the performance of something. I've concluded that if you get yourself a good machine that runs well from the start (i.e. no compromises thinking, "well, I'll fix it later") you'll be much happier.
What else would you want to add on, anyway, that a machine like the iMac doesn't already have built-in? Firewire's built in. Sound is built in. Bluetooth is built in. Most other things are available to plug in via USB, like TV tuners or hard drives.
In short, you might be surprised how little upgrading you actually do once you settle on a machine that "Just Works". By the time you're truly dissatisfied with the performance of your current iMac, the latest-and-greatest will blow it out of the water, and for probably half the price.
Great, well thought out post. This sums up what people should really consider rather than just slamming Windows or OSX.
Or linux, or unix, or hackintosh.
Not everyone loves OSX like you do
(rolls eyes at you)
At the risk of turning this into a "how to fix my PC" thread, I am going to boot and nuke my PC box and reinstall windows when I have nabbed all the files off of it and put them on my Mac. There is about 100Gb of files I would like to keep on this machine, so I will be unable to try a reinstall of Windows before I can find out if it works or not. Repeat: need to get data off before I try this. I know this is a software thing but i am unable to fix it via Windows XP repair or driver reinstalls (yes I have covered this already, especially as it is easy to replace the default BIOS on Lanparty boards) so a complete format and reinstall will be the only option to fix this.
PS: It's a Lanparty NF2 board - yes, my old system was based on an Althon 2500+
PPS: This all happened when my boot drive died and came back to life following a mundane hardware upgrade. I wanted to install a new 160GB drive and couldn't (drive was DOA). But when i put everything back together, the boot drive was corrupted (for no reason whatsoever). After struggling with it, it suddenly booted up ok, but thereafter I had terrible trouble with new USB devices not being recognised (actually, it would fail to install drivers, even for devices using default drivers, claiming the device was locked and access was denied).
One I Boot n Nuke and reinstall windows, I will be happier with it, but now that I have my Mac, I might just end up adding Linux and using it as a file server of sorts.
PS: It's a Lanparty NF2 board - yes, my old system was based on an Althon 2500+
PPS: This all happened when my boot drive died and came back to life following a mundane hardware upgrade. I wanted to install a new 160GB drive and couldn't (drive was DOA). But when i put everything back together, the boot drive was corrupted (for no reason whatsoever). After struggling with it, it suddenly booted up ok, but thereafter I had terrible trouble with new USB devices not being recognised (actually, it would fail to install drivers, even for devices using default drivers, claiming the device was locked and access was denied).
One I Boot n Nuke and reinstall windows, I will be happier with it, but now that I have my Mac, I might just end up adding Linux and using it as a file server of sorts.
Of course not! I obviously meant that version of Linux/Unix which is designed to look and feel like OSX!
At the risk of turning this into a "how to fix my PC" thread, I am going to boot and nuke my PC box and reinstall windows when I have nabbed all the files off of it and put them on my Mac. There is about 100Gb of files I would like to keep on this machine, so I will be unable to try a reinstall of Windows before I can find out if it works or not. Repeat: need to get data off before I try this. I know this is a software thing but i am unable to fix it via Windows XP repair or driver reinstalls (yes I have covered this already, especially as it is easy to replace the default BIOS on Lanparty boards) so a complete format and reinstall will be the only option to fix this.
PS: It's a Lanparty NF2 board - yes, my old system was based on an Althon 2500+
PPS: This all happened when my boot drive died and came back to life following a mundane hardware upgrade. I wanted to install a new 160GB drive and couldn't (drive was DOA). But when i put everything back together, the boot drive was corrupted (for no reason whatsoever). After struggling with it, it suddenly booted up ok, but thereafter I had terrible trouble with new USB devices not being recognised (actually, it would fail to install drivers, even for devices using default drivers, claiming the device was locked and access was denied).
One I Boot n Nuke and reinstall windows, I will be happier with it, but now that I have my Mac, I might just end up adding Linux and using it as a file server of sorts.
Boot drive corrupted you say? Hmmm... sounds like a hardware fault causing all your trouble! Can't be blaming windows for a hardware fault. If i corrupted your OSX hard drive then i'd suspect OSX would start acting funny too. Maybe throwing a few kernel panics!
There is a way to reinstall windows from scratch without formatting the hard drive. Actually a few ways, one is to boot off the disk but anyway... I'll go home and see if i can get the commands for you.
Basically on the XP cd boot up you are given an option to repair a previous install (F3 or something). This is not a reinstall, just a repair.
From this you get a command line and then you can delete the windows and program files folders. After this you can install windows from scratch on your drive.
Quite.
Yes, in fact this is the first thing I tried when I first realised there is a problem, and the repair screen merely hangs and does nothing. Useless bloody Windows.
I know you are an electrical engineer and appear to have experience with this, but trust me; I too know what I am talking about and I have determined it to be Windows being messed up, probably from a hardware failure, but still it should be fixable using the repair utility on the disc, but it doesn't. Completely. In the light of this, Windows does not gain my favour by being so messed up so that it cannot be fixed without a reinstall.
I am faced with the prospect of reinstallation as a last ditch resort. Not a big deal, after all, I have a new iMac and the PC runs so slowly that i really can't be bothered with it any more. Regardless of whether it is hardware failure or not, I have torn my hair out trying to fix it without reinstalling (for the aforementioned reasons) and to be "ticked off" for blaming windows for my problem rather than a hardware failure is the last nail in the coffin. I am FED UP with the so-called Windows XPerience.
End of line
I did not advocate this method.
Also have you ever tried to repair a corrupt OSX install? I had to once after putting a bad memory stick into a laptop. I could not repair it. Well it did "repair" but still had the same problems. I had to copy all the files off onto my own laptop and do a format install.
It's hard in windows, that is true, but by god don't be thinking that OSX can magically do this better.
Electronic! That has nothing to do with it though. I don't know many electronic engineers who know as much as i do.
By the way, i feel bad that you have had problems with your computer. However, please don't go blaming windows for it. It isn't windows fault, it is not windows fault.
Corruption can hose a windows install, an OSX install and a linux install. No operating system ever made* can always repair itself after hardware data corruption. Some are better than others, but none of them will work 100% of the time.
*I know this is a broad statement
You're asking this in a Mac forum?
I've had many PCs, and they all died tragic, painful deaths. They were all slow as hell, and I've been dumb enough to pay $10,000 for a tricked out monster PC. I bought an iMac last month after my last PC died, and I will *never* buy a PC again!
I *love* my iMac! It's fast. There are no blue screens of death. It works all the time, and right out of the box! I never have to fight with it. I have not found a single USB toy that won't connect and work just by plugging it in. I am not nagged to death every five seconds with warnings. There are no viruses! Seriously, get the iMac! It may cost a bit more, but *trust me*, it's worth every penny! You know you want to! You will never regret it. Buy the iMac! But that's just my opinion, based on my experience.
I've had many PCs, and they all died tragic, painful deaths. They were all slow as hell, and I've been dumb enough to pay $10,000 for a tricked out monster PC. I bought an iMac last month after my last PC died, and I will *never* buy a PC again!
I *love* my iMac! It's fast. There are no blue screens of death. It works all the time, and right out of the box! I never have to fight with it. I have not found a single USB toy that won't connect and work just by plugging it in. I am not nagged to death every five seconds with warnings. There are no viruses! Seriously, get the iMac! It may cost a bit more, but *trust me*, it's worth every penny! You know you want to! You will never regret it. Buy the iMac! But that's just my opinion, based on my experience.
I've seen macs that have died tragic painful deaths. I know people who were dumb enough to spend thousands on G5 Powermacs only to have their processors die!
I *love* my PC. No spinning beach balls of death. It works all the time, right out of the box. I have not found a single USB device that wouldn't work. ETC.
I could go on... you had a bad experience with windows... boo hoo. I've had bad experiences with OSX, Linux and windows. I don't bad mouth them.
Thankfully though i generally have no problems with any of the major OSes (except for linux).
Windows has its faults, so does OSX and linux.
Quite an interesting thread we have here. TBi, I feel that we are in basic agreement, but you misread my post just a little bit. I said buy the best that you can afford, not the most expensive that you can afford. As you aptly pointed out, more expensive can simply equate to more options (and more hardware to fail).
I also agree with notjustjay's observation. I really don't think that the great majority of people (99+%) ever upgrade their hardware. If they are really looking to upgrade, many only end up keeping the case, if that! I do believe that many people feel happier living under the illusion that they have the option to upgrade and that they will at some point in the future.
I also agree with notjustjay's observation. I really don't think that the great majority of people (99+%) ever upgrade their hardware. If they are really looking to upgrade, many only end up keeping the case, if that! I do believe that many people feel happier living under the illusion that they have the option to upgrade and that they will at some point in the future.
I mostly want to replace failed parts such as the hard drive or optical drive. When the CDRW drive died in my Mac, I replaced it with a DVDRW drive. I always add extra memory to all my computers, Macs and Windows. Often times, I add a second internal hard drive to my computers.