Buying Notebook: Mac or PC?

Not quite, Kim.

All new Macs ship with the latest version of OS X (Leopard), and this comes with a program (a boot loader) called "Boot Camp". Boot Camp allows a Mac to divide the hard disk into a Mac partition and a Windows partition, install Windows XP onto the Windows partition and give the user a choice at start up of whether they want to run OS X or Windows XP. It's not an emulator -- it actually runs Windows natively.

Why would people buy a Mac rather than a PC? Well, they might want to run OS X which is judged by many people to be faster, more reliable, more responsive, more intuitive and easier to manage than Windows. But of course, that's a matter of opinion.

If you want to stick with Windows, then a Mac can still be worth considering; one of the big computer magazines did a big group test of laptops and discovered that the fastest Windows machine in the whole group was..... a MacBook Pro!

Some Windows users buy Macs because they can sell the machines after 2 years for 60-70% of the price they originally paid for them. Over the same period, a PC's value declines to a small fraction of its original cost.

So there you go! The choice is yours. Hope that helps...

We are Kim, but I didn't recommend virtualisation software because it means that WeavingAWeb would...

• have to spend extra money on the software (which he won't want to do)
• have to spend extra money on a memory upgrade (which he would need to do)
• have to run Windows XP at less than full-speed (which he won't want to do)
• be able to share data between Win XP applications and OS X applications (when he hasn't got any OS X apps yet)

Hence, I didn't mention Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion.

Boot Camp would be the best place for WAW to start because it's bundled with the Mac for free, it will run Windows at full speed and Windows gets all 1GB of the memory in which to run. But it also allows WAW to reboot into OS X whenever he feels like it, play around and learn the Mac way of doing things at his own pace.

@WeavingAWeb: If you have any questions about Macs, I'd recommend going over to the forums at www.123MacMini.com -- I'm a regular contributor there. We're a friendly bunch and are happy to help.

No, you're absolutely right Kim! The Mac doesn't ship with XP, it ships with 'Boot Camp' which allows someone who already has XP to install it on a Mac. From then on, the Mac is able to behave exactly like a Windows PC.

I've heard of people who deliberately buy a Mac Mini with the intention of running nothing other than Windows on it, because it's such a small machine and it's almost completely silent. They like the unobtrusive nature of the machine, but have no desire to use the Mac operating system. Which I think is absolutely great! If it works for them, then best of luck to them!

I couldn't agree more, Dorothy.

I see people on the WF asking for help from others to correct the errant behaviour of their Windows machines, and I think "Why on earth are you putting yourself through this? Life's too short to tolerate this crap!".

I'm not being 'another smug Mac fan'; I used to be that person, struggling every day to keep Windows working and never even considering changing my computer to another system out of the fear that "it won't be the one that everyone else uses".

Then one day, I snapped. I was going through the usual 'format the hard drive and re-install the OS' ritual that Windows users perform when their computer has all but ground to a halt, when the Windows installer reported that it couldn't 'see' my external modem. When I tried to tell Windows to check the serial port, it told me that it couldn't see the serial port.

At that point, I went out and bought a Mac. Never looked back since.

That's a general assumption but not really accurate.
Macs don't have the viruses only because of percentages. If you have an OS with 97% of the market and an OS with 3%, who are you going to write viruses for? Probably not the 3% market.
As macs market share has grown, so have the number of viruses for them.

An fas as reliability, most PC problems are in fact user error problems. NOw remember, I said most, not all. And in some circumstances,mands and pc have had the same problems.

As far as generally run better than PCs, I would have to again say no, because as I said before ,most problems PC users have are caused by PC users.

I have a pc I bought in 1995 that has never had any problems. And that was before I started custom building PCs.
Almost every person I have built a custom PC for has told me that they never knew a PC could run as well as the one I built for them.

Now, I am not saying that macs are good.They have their place, But to say they done have the above mentioned problems that PCs do is inaccurate.

Hi,

I'm a Mac user but I also use a PC.

With your $3000 budget, I'd get both. Get a MacBook (not pro) with 4 GB Ram and a second monitor. Get a decent PC and a KVM switch to switch the keyboard, mouse and the second monitor between the two computers. Get a copy of Parallels -- sometimes its better to run the PC apps on the Mac for copy and paste reasons.

I bought my PC from Acer's refurbish site and got a great deal. You'd probably end up with change from your $3000.

Steve

I'm laughing out loud here -- I've got to tell you why...

First, a confession: I honestly thought you had me there. I thought that there had been some Mac virus released into the wild that I hadn't heard about, and you were going to drop a bombshell...

Then I read the links, and breathed a sigh of relief! :rolleyes:

Uhhhh... They do or they can????

Then here's the best bit at the end...
ROTFL!!! Generally speaking? For goodness sake, do they or don't they? What's this "generally speaking" all about???

Kim, let me fill in some blanks... There have been reports that two or three worms and trojans have been developed in complete captivity that have been potentially been able to exploit security weaknesses in Mac OS X. Every time that such a potential weakness has been discovered, Apple have been very quick off the mark to patch it up.

OS X's good security record has very little to do with Apple being some bright, shiny computer company and is really far more to do with the fact that OS X is based on Unix. Unix dates from the 60s and is therefore the result of decades of development.

Stories came out of Microsoft claiming that when Bill Gates learned that version 10 of Apple's operating system was going to be a complete re-write based on Unix, he was pretty angry and accused Apple of 'cheating' by borrowing code from the open source community to create "Darwin", OS X's kernel. Good old Bill...

You're right Kim, we could go back and forth. I going to post just one link, hope that you read the opening paragraph (most of which I think you'll agree with) and then I'm going to leave the subject alone:
Call Me Fishmeal.: Mac OS X Viruses: Put Up or Shut Up (part 1)

I really hope that you haven't misinterpreted my intentions here. I'm not on a mission to "convert the world to Apple". I'm not a yoga-practicing, Prius-driving, organic tofu eater who wears the "Apple user" badge as an elitist. Nor am I a fan of Steve Jobs; the stories that tell of how he shafted the very people who helped to get him where he is now are a testament to the ruthless, self-absorbed man that he is.

I advise other people to try the Mac because it simply does as it's told. It obeys without question. Day in, day out, month in, month out, it just does what you tell it to do. Just like Dorothy described.

Even if we forget all about virus susceptibility, Windows is still an unreliable business partner. Now there might be very good reasons for that -- Windows has more applications to play host to, it's tried to be backward compatible with DOS for a long time, it has to work with trillions of different hardware configurations, etc., etc. I understand all of that.

But you know what? I don't care. I'm not on this earth to be a sympathetic friend of Microsoft's products -- nor of Apple's for that matter. I'm here to be a friend of me and my future. And this means that I want tools that help me to achieve my goals. I don't want to spend time wrestling with lost DLLs or wondering what a "Fatal Exception Error" is, I just want to make progress. And I think that other regular people want that as well.

So that's why I recommend Macs. They just do as they're damn well told.

Thanks for your post Dorothy. I agree very much with your sentiments.

Dorothy, you're the first person I've talked to that has suffered a Mac virus. Which means that I'm going to have to eat my words after some of the things that I said in previous posts on this thread.

Sorry, Kim -- I stand corrected! You were right and I was wrong. I'd better do my homework a little more thoroughly next time. Hope there's no hard feelings!