Thinking of Mac over HP, why? Battery life. Important for college?

[budkid]

IF you are going to a big school you will see a lot a people with macbooks.

The macbook is great for school. I start off school with a full battery. I have three 2 hour classes. I have my macbook out half the time for each of those three classes. Sometimes I still have a good charge by the end of my last class. I pretty much discharge my battery everyday.

 

[nick9191]

It's things like this that make you wonder just what kind of nonsense people will believe and try to spread about Windows just to make Windows look bad.

Are you the same person who tried to argue this before?

You have obviously never used Windows on a multi-core or multi-processor system.

Windows core processes themselves are not multi-threaded, as nearly all of OS X's core processes are not multi-threaded.

Multi-threaded applications, however, run just fine in either OS. Look at Handbrake. It's a multi-threaded app. You see both cores jump up to full usage and the work gets done twice as fast. Same as Nero in Windows. If you're encoding video with it and you have a multi-core/processor system, the work gets done faster. Look at UT3, a game. If you have a Core 2 Duo and you set it to use 1 core in Windows your performance drops by half. Same with Grand Theft Auto 4.

And other applications in Windows can take individual control of the cores. Look at dbpoweramp. I rip my CDs with EAC to FLAC for archival and quality purposes then I use dbpoweramp to convert the FLAC files to LAME 3.98.2 -v 0 (better than Apple's AAC encoder). dbpoweramp will use individual cores to encode a song. If you have a 4 core system you can encode 4 songs at once.

Windows multi-processor support is every bit as good as OS Xs. Please don't try to spread this nonsense. Even back in the day, Windows NT's multi-core support was fine.

Again, both Windows NT based OS's and OS X, Linux etc. both perform SMP. There is a difference in how it is carried out. OS X and Linux perform true SMP, Windows performs a different kind of SMP.

I should also point out that Mac OS has had SMP since OS 7, long before NT had it, and neither 95, 98, or ME had any kind of SMP at all. In fact XP home despite being NT based has no SMP, whilst XP Pro can do SMP, although its still crap for multicore systems being written in Bible times.

And I stand by my claim, 7 years after OS X you still cannot perform true SMP. You can perform an inferior form of SMP to OS X and Linux.

Not to mention you are going to get your ass handed to you on multi core when Snow Leopard arrives.

 

[gotzaiPhone]

It sounds like these were the low-level products, which are terrible. I've had several Dell and HP laptops, which worked (and still work) great. They are, of course, the middle of the road units though, and I believe the build quality to be better than the low-end units.

The first one maybe, it was 800 bucks, but the second one was a BRAND NEW TOP OF THE LINE HP Pavilion DV1000 entertainment notebook when it came out at 1600 bucks.

Now as far as what gotzaiPhone said about HP's practices when it comes to warranty support, I honestly don't believe it one bit. What he described would be illegal under the Magnuson-Moss act as well as many state laws. HP simply CAN NOT treat people that way if they are still under warranty. My experience with HP has been that they have been quick to replace, and upgrade, any time I've had a small problem that could have been repaired.

I also want to point out that HDD failures are NOT the fault of the computer manufacturer. Everyone buys the same WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Seagate, etc. drives.

I am well aware of the Magnuson-Moss act as I am a heavy modder with my sports cars and the act isn't worth crap unless you have the money to fight it. As for my HP experience, I have no reason to lie, so believe what you will, but it was the truth in my situation.

Instead of believing mosx and the few people that he knows - try this for those statistics :-

http://www.theacsi.org/ who show that Apple tops league tables for the 5th straight year. The university calculated the ACSI scores based on a consumer's overall satisfaction with a company's customer service, product quality and value, among other factors and Apple came out top again. Apple is well clear of both Dell and HP.

HP scores 73 points and Dell 75 compared to 85 for Apple. These scores are out of 100.


Ironically HP have dropped 4% since last year.

I also tried turning the brightness down really low - and its fine even for my old eyes that now need reading glasses.
Maintenance tasks - sorry mosx - you're wrong - macs running 10.5 do it themselves.
Also why does Microsoft provide Defender if its not needed by Windows?

Thank you for pointing out facts with references to back them up and not, "well I heard....."

 

[mosx]

And the idea that vista could "learn your usage habits" is just stupid. Sure, eventually it might notice the programs you use the most and put them in your start menu, but that hardly makes a difference...

You don't believe me? Google "SuperFetch" and you'll see.

Use Vista for a week so you can get used to how slow it is.

On the same machine, Vista is faster than Leopard. I know from experience.

So who says the opposite to http://www.theacsi.org/ ? J.D Power back in 2005

I pointed it out to show that those kinds of things mean absolutely nothing. Awards can be bought and customer service surveys can easily be skewed. Again, look at Apple fans. Even though some have gone through multiple motherboard failures and other component failures on a single machine they still worship Apple and rate them above anyone else.

but amazingly back then you were saying HP products etc were rubbish and switched to Apple. Another contradiction on your part.

Because of the fact that HP had used a bad ATI chipset in the notebook I had.

Little did I realize I was starting on a journey that HP would right everything and that my experience with Apple would turn out to be far worse.

You like to stay in the past and not focus on the present or the future. We've gone over this in other threads. Bringing up something like that is absolutely foolish because I already admitted I made a mistake in being so quick to judge HP at that time.

As for the rest of the comments regarding what customers will accept - do you have anything to back it up or just more of your opinions and nothing else.

Browse these forums. You'll find hundreds of posts where people got the shaft by Apple's build quality but still praise the company itself.

You are still wrong about maintenance tasks

Prove it.

You haven't answered why Microsoft feels Windows needs Defender if it can't catch a virus?

For all of the people who ignore the multiple warnings and install the malicious software anyway.

That was already explained.

Again, both Windows NT based OS's and OS X, Linux etc. both perform SMP. There is a difference in how it is carried out. OS X and Linux perform true SMP, Windows performs a different kind of SMP.

haha and whats your definition of "true SMP"? Please explain this to me.

I should also point out that Mac OS has had SMP since OS 7, long before NT had it, and neither 95, 98, or ME had any kind of SMP at all.

It wasn't introduced into System 7 until 7.5.5 which was released September 27th 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0 Windows NT 4.0 was released BEFORE 7.5.5 and had SMP support.

Also, NT 3.1, released 3 years earlier, had pre-emptive multi-tasking support.

So not only did Windows get pre-emptive multi-tasking a full 7 years before Mac OS, but it also had SMP before Mac OS did as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing "# Mac OS (7.5.5 to 9.2.2) and Mac OS X"

Face it, Mac OS is always playing catch-up compared to Windows

And going back to that time period, SMP support means absolutely nothing when the OS doesn't even have pre-emptive multi-tasking. Sure you could have two processors doing twice the work in half the time, but up until OS X, Mac OS would only let the "in focus" application have full access to system resources. So not only could you not let something run fast in the background, but the multi-tasking in Mac OS was junk and you couldn't take advantage of both processors abilities by having multiple apps open at one time because co-operative multi-tasking would pull resources from those apps and dedicate it all to the in-focus app.

For example, let's say iMovie existed back in those days. Now you can let iMovie encode a movie using multiple cores/processors in the background while going on with your other tasks like nothing. Thats thanks to pre-emptive multi-tasking dividing system resources equally amongst all applications. But all pre-OS X version of Mac OS didn't do that. If you started encoding that movie and then switched over to another app, co-operative multi-tasking would pull all the resources from that app, basically grinding the encoding to a halt, and allocate those resources to the app being used.

Windows NT (all versions) and Windows 95 and up didn't do that. They all had pre-emptive multi-tasking.

In fact XP home despite being NT based has no SMP, whilst XP Pro can do SMP,

You are completely and utterly wrong.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8366_7595~95364,00.html scroll down. XP Home supports it.

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/1079/dualcorehome8bb.jpg theres a screenshot I found on a forum while googling.

And straight from the horses mouth http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx

XP Home supports one physical processor but multiple cores on that processor.

So yes it does support SMP.

I got that link from a post on this forum

And I stand by my claim, 7 years after OS X you still cannot perform true SMP. You can perform an inferior form of SMP to OS X and Linux.

Haha, again, what is your version of "true SMP"? Please explain this. Because I've been reading over wikipedia and other things for the last half hour and I have yet to see ANYONE but you try to say that Windows is somehow "inferior" in its support of SMP than other OSes.

Not to mention you are going to get your ass handed to you on multi core when Snow Leopard arrives.

rofl, how so? Because Apple says so? Core technologies in Snow Leopard already exist in Windows, like CUDA.

Not to mention the fact that Apple's word doesn't mean much. They call OS X the "most advanced OS on the planet" yet its OpenGL support is lackluster even compared to Linux and it can't even fully hardware accelerate video, despite the fact that modern GPUs support full bitstream decoding on their very own hardware.

The first one maybe, it was 800 bucks, but the second one was a BRAND NEW TOP OF THE LINE HP Pavilion DV1000 entertainment notebook when it came out at 1600 bucks.

When you say it like that it sounds like you bought it from Best Buy. You know that Best Buy sells overpriced junk, right? And that direct from HP is better and usually half the price.

Not to mention the fact that price says nothing of quality. Look at the MacBook Pro and then look at the HP dv5t CTO. HP is better in every way and it averages about $800 less.

I am well aware of the Magnuson-Moss act as I am a heavy modder with my sports cars and the act isn't worth crap unless you have the money to fight it. As for my HP experience, I have no reason to lie, so believe what you will, but it was the truth in my situation.

Thats not true at all as far as Magnuson-Moss goes. Magnuson-Moss is a Federal law but it is always carried out in small claims court. If a company violates Magnuson-Moss then you are able to take them to small claims and not only will they be responsible for damages, but your time and court costs as well. $40 to file small claims and serve the company isn't exactly big money.

And most states have strong consumer protection laws also.

Look at California as an example. The consumer protection laws here are so strong that even mentioning small claims is enough to get even the largest corporation to bend to your will.

So yes, what HP did, if they did it to you at all, was completely illegal and theres no way they could have gotten away with it. They would not have done that knowing the fact that it would hurt them financially.