Dear Apple Fanboys:

[jnshk]

This post is just here for my own reference the next time Apple fanboy starts spouting off about how Macs never crash, never need service, and never ever have any problems at all. Here is some anecdotal evidence and a real-world example that Macs aren't necessarily God's gift to operating systems.

"Sorry about the stupid comic, my main work

Comments

[jnshk]

LOL, no doubt. Your PC was aaaaalways fubared. I've generally found that if you remove all the junk that most PC retailers install on the computers and do a clean install of Windows by itself, you get much better results in the long run.

A few years back when I was still at WVU, they had G4 PowerMacs in most of the computer labs. We had nothing but problems with them in the J-school, and we actually had to cancel a class one day because a handful of the PowerMacs locked up and pretty much brought down the whole J-school building network. I managed to crash or freeze one up nearly twice a week (and I only had that class twice a week, if that tells you anything).

That said, I've seen (and had) Windows computers do some pretty heinous things too. Win98se was actually pretty stable for me until a few years ago when I purchased some larger hard drives and started moving lots of data around. Fat32 file system is just about totally obsolete for today's computing needs. My WinXP install was even more stable--with the exception of handling some device drivers (my printer and my webcam often gave me trouble, but that was probably more to do with the devices than the OS)--until the computer got hit by a lightning power surge. I still actually like XP quite a lot when I can get it set up to my preferences (Win9x looks and behavior, lol). Vista brought about a lot of nice new security and usability features that are worthwhile, but unfortunately it's also a poorly thrown together piece of ... Vista could have been great, but it just isn't. It was released long before it was ready (and it still isn't ready, IMO) and many of the problems are probably more underlying fundamental issues that can't be easily fixed by an update or "service pack." I'm guessing this is why Microsoft has pretty much stopped trying to sell people on Vista (focusing on the concept of being "a PC" instead) and has been developing Windows 7 (which sounds kind of promising from what I've heard so far).

I'm really wanting to get into some flavor of Linux, personally. I fooled around with Ubuntu a bit and I really like a lot of things about it, but I'm not yet familiar enough with the underlying Linux stuff and I don't have time to play around with it the way that I would like to. I have a feeling that I may start dual-booting Linux in the future and slowly getting away from Windows as much as possible though.

[highfivejunkie]

nerd!!

yeah occasionally the iMacs in our j-school computer labs would foul up, but usually it was because someone who didn't know what they were doing did something ridiculous.

The problem I had most often was burning disks. Other than that it was typically smooth.

[jnshk]

Ours would lock up any time you tried to open Quark Xpress or Photoshop, and crashed any time you went to save a document. :-(