Help deciding on Mac or Pentium 4

DavidEB wrote in post #2701842
OS upgrades don't leave you feeling anxious

Unless you happen to own an old 2nd video card, which needs a "sudo nvram boot-args="romndrv=1"" to be used under OSX.3 and higher

Even with OSX, I'll still wait a while before jumping in a new version.

I have both Mac Pro and a P4 PC, to be honest its really a personal preference, they can do the same thing and get the job done. I m no gamer so I m not too worry about which machine is better for games. But I do like OS X from Mac and its rock solid stable, and never fail on me. For windows .... hum, I always save every 5 mins... lol

I'm fairly new to all of the photo editing, but I find Mac much easier (I have both). I am using Aperture for editing and working with RAW files and it is very easy to use. Apple also offers ProCare if you live near an Apple Retail store and they provide personalized training for an hour a week to help with learning the software or anything else you would like to know. They just taught me some shortcuts and things I didn't know. So I love them!

If you buy anyone of the current crop of Intel based Macs then you can install virtually any operating system on it and have the best of all worlds. I have a MacBook Pro and have Windows XP running under a program called Paralles. I can have both up and running a switch back and forth anytime. There is very little loss of speed running under Paralles and if you install Windows under bootcamp then it runs with no speed loss at all, you just have to pick an operating system at startup.

Switched to Mac a month ago, have not looked back since, worth the money

Having made a living on and off of Microsoft OS's since the early nineties (Not true, I sold my first MSX program back in 1988, but that does not count as computing ), I would have to simply state that MACs are alive today because of their unmatched capacity for graphic's processing.

Windows will do pretty good, if you are on a budget. But if you are extremely serious about the editing and manipulation of graphics, MAC is the simple answer. You can get Windows XT, or Mac OS 1D (Pun intended).

Cheers,

According to the actual question, neither... AMD 64 X2 4800+ in RAID+0+DATA.

People always talk about the stability of OSX but I don't know what these people are doing to their WinXP boxes but mine never crash. I have one windows xp box that's currently just under 800 days of up time. Granted it doesn't get intensive use but even my XP box that does get intensive use I only reboot maybe once every 3 or 4 months and that's usually because an install demands it.

Kurt

if you already have a windows based pc and are getting another machine, wouldnt it make sense to stick with windows. Maybe im way too practical here. But it would seem to me that a lot of the software could be re-installed on the new pc. Plus i wouldnt ever say a pc is a budget machine where as a mac is performance machine. You get much better value out of a PC. a 3000 dollar mac and a 3000 dollar windows machine are very different.

For example a base mac pro (2500), is a dual xeon 2.66, gig of ram, 1 250 gig hd,and a nvidia 7300 256 video card. That machine costs almost identical to a pc more or less depending. But when you start adding in upgrades to a preconfigured mac to a build you own PC the price differece really shows. to upgrade to 4 gigs of ram apple wants $1100, with $1100 in a pc you put in 8 gigs and add 3 320 gig harddrives. Once you start upgrading you will find home built/custom pcs to be cheaper and better. Plus you can customize them any way you see fit. Also the benefits of shoving xeons into a server board and running it in a desktop environment are slowly fading. with the introduction of quad core CPU's means that what used to take two can now be done in one. i would have a tough time convincing myself that a dual dual core mac with 1 gig of ram would beat a quad core 8 gig windows pc in multitasking and performance.

I like apple a lot. I think they build nice machines, but i also take what the owners say with grains of salt. The truth of the matter is, if your running a router at your house or office to distribute the internet, then you should have one barrier of proctection against malware and viruses, the other is your own common sense and knowing where you are on the internet. I run virus software about once every other month (i leave it turned off) and have never found a virus, and the only time i have ever found malware on my puter was when i was when i went to a site and d/led a program that i had no clue about (my own fault). Plus macs are just as easily targeted as Windows pcs, its just with less then 10% of the total computing population using a mac there is no true reason to break into a mac. you know, i guess what it comes down to is how much time are you willing to invest, and is that time worth the savings your gonna see. Xp is stable if you dont use some of those fringe programs that arent coded well. If you want/need plug and play then Mac all the way, but if you can tinker, or if you know how to reinstall windows then your best bet it to go with a PC. good luck.

holrd wrote in post #2707229
if you already have a windows based pc and are getting another machine, wouldnt it make sense to stick with windows.

Well, if you've already invested 10 years in a bad marriage, doesn't it make sense to stay in that marriage?

But with a Mac, you could install both Mac OS X and XP Pro/Vista.

Yes, the Mac is much better.

This doesn't make sense, since Macs and PCs use the same components. If you buy from Apple, it can be a bit more expensive (especially RAM), but you don't have to buy from Apple. I don't. Building your own is a whole other matter. How many people have the skill, time and/or inclination to do this?

This is a nonissue. The Xenon quad-core is pin-compatible with the Xenon dual core. These are seated (not soldered) onto the Mac Pro's logic board and will soon be available to Mac customers straight from Apple and an upgrade option to those who want to replace their dual-cores (pull out the old processors and put the new ones in). If you want more RAM, buy it from your favorite Really Cheap Chip Vendor and put it into your Mac. Plus, Mac OS X is a single, partially 64-bit OS. As I understand, with Vista you have choose either the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version, and for the latter the availabilty of compatible drivers for various hardware is somewhat limited. If you install the 64-bit version of Vista, there may not be a driver available for your video card. Is this correct?

This is only partially true. In order for a virus or trojan to get into the Mac filesystem, it would have to circumvent root access control (BSD Unix), which even the person using the computer has restricted access to. Without superuser authentication, you cannot alter the filesystem. This is why Macs are more secure. (There's already been a hack into Vista, and we're only a week into its release.)