Comments | science_officer: I'm A Mac, And I'm Not A PC

science_officer

I'm A Mac, And I'm Not A PC

Sep 09, 2008 18:22

I switched to Mac almost 14 months ago, and generally, I'm happy with my decision. Today, for the first time, my iMac had its first Windows-style total freeze-up: keyboard would not respond, couldn't toggle between windows on the screen, etc. I turned the thing off, and then turned it back on again. Problem solved! Since this sort of crud ( Read more... )

mac pc windows hodgman

Comments 7

bear_helms September 12 2008, 22:13:21 UTC

I'm a very wishy-washy computer user. The main problem being, every time there's a new game out, it tends to be PC only. Some games that do run on PC/Mac usually can be made to run lots faster for lots less money (in terms of upgrading hardware) than doing so for a Mac. Of course, were I to buy the nice big Mac you plug graphics cards into and what have you, that would be a little less of the case, but even so, there are seemingly 50 additional product choices for PC than for a Mac when it comes to an upgrade that will work on its inside ( ... )

Thought-provoking! science_officer September 13 2008, 03:59:40 UTC

What you wrote is genuinely thought-provoking, because I hadn't even considered heat--as in a hardware issue--as the possible origin of the problem. Even so, everything was okay when I turned the iMac off and turned it on again, so that may have not been the reason. I'll keep temperature in mind during the next 14 months (my estimated time-to-next-iMac-failure).

As for Windows operating systems, I like WinXP Pro just fine, especially in "classic" mode with the animated search character turned off, but not so much WinXP Home (or whatever the "normal" edition is). Where Vista is concerned, a co-worker who has a brand-new, top-of-the-line laptop says that she likes Vista. Almost everyone else does not like it. I've never used Vista, but I've heard it described as a bug-ridden clone of OSX. Me, I've got actual OSX (10.4.11, which I guess is "Tiger") and it seems to work great. So, I'll stay with it ( ... )

Re: Thought-provoking! bear_helms September 13 2008, 18:21:19 UTC

The iMacs in question all ran the rest of the day without problems after being forced to power off without further incident, save for the new, shiny Aluminum iMac which as of late does get to a point where once these freeze-ups happen, the next can be as close as 2 hours away - if I'm still gaming.

XP Pro is the specific flavor I am running for gaming, and I do use a set of registry tweaks to turn off the animated search character and several other superfluous functions that eat memory and CPU cycles to no useful (at least to me) purpose.

Steve Jobs has a lot to say about Mac design to this day. One fellow who works for him (did the firmware for the "Mighty Mouse") says he has an instinctive feel for what's cool. Jobs might know what's cool, but from an engineering standpoint, he doesn't. Namely, what makes for a good cooling design.

Since 1984, Macintosh computers could have had fans built in to cool them, but Jobs hates their white noise, and insisted on having them excluded in favor of passive air cooling, where vents permit air ( ... )

WinXP and OSX science_officer September 13 2008, 21:23:24 UTC

Glad to hear that you have XP Pro. One weird thing that happens with XP Pro during shutdown is that spellapp.exe, which is used by other applications above and beyond just WINWORD.EXE, seems to balk and create errors. Not when you're actually checking spelling, but when shutting the PC down. I'm almost certain that this hasn't been fixed by a recent service pack since I refer here to office computers, and the updates are installed on those automatically ( ... )

Thread 7