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Who here runs to OS's and what's your view on it?

M

mep42

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 4, 2008
59
0
I will be getting a new computer for school, and thought I was set on getting a 13 in uMBP, but then I had an idea. I have been speaking with a friend who has a very successful IT company and he can get me a insane deal on a extremely powerful PC and he can get me that with windows 7 ultimate, and CS4 design premium for $1200. So Instead of getting an under-powered for what I need MBP for $1500 plus software, or getting a 15 MBP that works for me for $2000 plus software, I was thinking get a desktop PC and a refurb macbook pro/ air to use for light stuff and leave the heavy editing and games to the PC. He on the contrary said either go all the way to PC or stay with the mac. What do I do???

Thanks for the help!

mark
 
You say underpowered. But you're a student, and forgive me if I'm wrong but I presume you're a younger student, as you can't spell 'Two'.

What would you be using it for? Word processing? What else do you need?

I've been running on a 2.13Ghz Core 2 Duo for the past 3 years, and it's been great, but since I switched to my uMBP I haven't touched my PC.

I'm sorry but you're seeming kind of... not exactly a spoilt rich kid, but as if you want the best of the PC World for writing up some homework.

Sorry if I sound kind of negative, but its just the way I'm understanding your situation?
 
I don't know where you get this rich kid stuff, and sorry I wrote "two" wrong. Back to the subject, the editing would be PS, I will also use illustrator, It will also have to handle tens of thousands of pictures. I hope this enables you to "understand my situation."
 
I have a vista box with a decent AMD processor, 3 gigs of ram and my MBP kicks the absolute crap out of it in every way and though I utilize an external monitor for things like photoshop I wouldn't do it any other way. I can't stand doing anything like that on a PC after I've seen the way it runs on my mac.
 
mep42 said:
I don't know where you get this rich kid stuff, and sorry I wrote "two" wrong. Back to the subject, the editing would be PS, I will also use illustrator, It will also have to handle tens of thousands of pictures. I hope this enables you to "understand my situation."
Click to expand...

Sorry, I'm tired and couldn't fully understand what you were asking. (Its 1:30AM here.)

Ok, but still, you don't really need a hugely powerful mac for it, just need one with a larger HDD, and the discrete graphics card. You'd be fine with the 2.66Ghz 15" uMBP to be honest, which is in your $2000 budget.

And as stated earlier by tempusfugit, any mac really will kick away any PC you get.

Was this one he offered you a home-built one? Or a HP or whatever?
 
i would get a refurb and a powerful pc i have a white macbook and a powerful vista desktop and i play games alot on it and i would definatley recommend having both
 
JoelKelly said:
Sorry, I'm tired and couldn't fully understand what you were asking. (Its 1:30AM here.)

Ok, but still, you don't really need a hugely powerful mac for it, just need one with a larger HDD, and the discrete graphics card. You'd be fine with the 2.66Ghz 15" uMBP to be honest, which is in your $2000 budget.

And as stated earlier by tempusfugit, any mac really will kick away any PC you get.

Was this one he offered you a home-built one? Or a HP or whatever?
Click to expand...

He is going to send me the specs tomorrow, but this what he said in the email, " An HP xw6600 Quad-core Xeon professional business workstation with 8GB fully-buffered registered ECC RAM & nVidia Quatro NVS graphics, again (open-box, full warranty) would be about $1200"
 
mep42 said:
He is going to send me the specs tomorrow, but this what he said in the email, " An HP xw6600 Quad-core Xeon professional business workstation with 8GB fully-buffered registered ECC RAM & nVidia Quatro NVS graphics, again (open-box, full warranty) would be about $1200"
Click to expand...

Unless your going to be rendering 3D animation then I really don't think you need all of the bells and whistles of that PC.

What do you plan to major in? PS (or AI) really just require fast hard drives & lots of RAM and not so much processing power. Not to mention you should be able to get a significant discount on Adobe products through your schools store.

All in all you really should ask your department on which is the preferred OS. I'm a computer science major, so they really don't care what you use but I do work close to the design department and they only use Macs.....period. The design department at my school doesn't even give support to students who have trouble with CS4 and Windows.
 
If you can get a sweet pc then what is there to discuss? Btw, switching between mac and pc constantly would be a hassle.
 
The Adobe CS software runs sooooo well on OSX. I'm sure either computer could do it, but i believe macs were made for design work. The file storage (since u said tens of thousands of pics) is great, especially with Spotlight. You'll be able to find anything right away.
 
I find that Adobe's CS4 is more annoying on OSX. It's the worst version of the Creative Suite package so far and the OSX version goes against pretty much all OSX usage conventions. I mean Adobe can't even get something as simple as keyboard shortcuts uniform between their programs and each CS4 program is riddled with strange bugs and usability flaws. Yes, these same things apply to the Windows version, but it's obvious that they simply ported CS4 to OSX without considering how things are done in OSX vs Windows.

But getting back on topic, I'd go for the PC. It sounds like a good deal to me. Windows 7 is a good operating system, far less annoying than XP. Of course, nothing would stop you from turning the PC into a Hackintosh, if only the graphics card will work.

Do you already have a good monitor though? For image editing you won't be satisfied with either the screens on the MBP or some crappy cheap external monitor.
 
If you can get a great deal on a PC and you plan or want to use PC software its hard to argue about spending a lot of money on a MBP when a desktop, regardless if its a Mac or PC will definitely be faster.

Personally I think Mac's are superior in hardware design and the OS is better but that doesn't mean I run only one OS. I also use Ubuntu and boot into that, when I want or need to. I run linux for my job and it works better then windows. Uses less resources and has none of the issues that plague windows. That's basically why I chose OSX as well :D

Lack of DLL issues, no registry to corrupt or cause problems, no viruses, no activation, phoning home etc.
 
mep42 said:
I will be getting a new computer for school, and thought I was set on getting a 13 in uMBP, but then I had an idea. I have been speaking with a friend who has a very successful IT company and he can get me a insane deal on a extremely powerful PC and he can get me that with windows 7 ultimate, and CS4 design premium for $1200. So Instead of getting an under-powered for what I need MBP for $1500 plus software, or getting a 15 MBP that works for me for $2000 plus software, I was thinking get a desktop PC and a refurb macbook pro/ air to use for light stuff and leave the heavy editing and games to the PC. He on the contrary said either go all the way to PC or stay with the mac. What do I do???

Thanks for the help!

mark
Click to expand...
Well, considering CS4 Design Premium is about $1200 on its own, and Windows 7 Ultimate hasn't been released yet, it sounds fishy to me...
 
Fizzoid said:
Well, considering CS4 Design Premium is about $1200 on its own, and Windows 7 Ultimate hasn't been released yet, it sounds fishy to me...
Click to expand...

Don't worry, he does IT for many small to medium size business.
 
mep42 said:
I will be getting a new computer for school, and thought I was set on getting a 13 in uMBP, but then I had an idea. I have been speaking with a friend who has a very successful IT company and he can get me a insane deal on a extremely powerful PC and he can get me that with windows 7 ultimate, and CS4 design premium for $1200. So Instead of getting an under-powered for what I need MBP for $1500 plus software, or getting a 15 MBP that works for me for $2000 plus software, I was thinking get a desktop PC and a refurb macbook pro/ air to use for light stuff and leave the heavy editing and games to the PC. He on the contrary said either go all the way to PC or stay with the mac. What do I do???

Thanks for the help!

mark
Click to expand...


If the deal is legit and you can get a powerful PC with all that software I'd take him up on it. The key idea here is the "legit" part. Make sure the software is genuine and not bootlegged on a homebuilt PC.
 
mep42 said:
He is going to send me the specs tomorrow, but this what he said in the email, " An HP xw6600 Quad-core Xeon professional business workstation with 8GB fully-buffered registered ECC RAM & nVidia Quatro NVS graphics, again (open-box, full warranty) would be about $1200"
Click to expand...

Have you thought about portability? A "business workstation" doesn't sound like something that's easy to carry around campus.
 
Its obvious none of the software would be legal.

Also remember the PC Would be loud, clunky, and generally PCish boring.
 
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