Taking Vista for a Spin

[Grandtheftcow]

Konk!!!

I picked up Vista this afternoon (Home Premium Edition) and will echo the sentiments from Mentalist that this is as big a step up as XP was to 98.

As to whether the average XP user should upgrade or not. I'd say XP has quite a few years left in it so there's no real hurry, and considering the cost involved I wouldn't buy it unless I had money to burn.

I'll post some more once I've got more stuff installed and have gone through more of the new features and changes offered.

 

[The Question]

I mentioned earlier that I've been considering an office shared between a PC and a Mac -- probably a space-saving little Dell XPS 210 and a Mac Mini, to be exact. So I've been looking at Macs very closely.

And if it were a choice of one or the other, I'd still choose a computer over a Mac.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Explain (in a logical and nonhyperbolic manner) how a Mac is not a computer.

And if all you wanna spend is for a Mini you deserve what you get. If this is for an office (meaning business), then buy business models, not housewife phone-desk models.

 

[Henoch]

i see no reason to upgrade from XP...yet.

 

[Henoch]

Can the Vista disc be copied? if so...i may be interested in giving it a go.

 

[Colonel Kira's Left Tit]

Can be, has been...etc.

 

[The Question]

Explain (in a logical and nonhyperbolic manner) how a Mac is not a computer.

It's a witticism, yer s'posedta nod'n'chuckle. Or shake yer head'n'chuckle. Your mileage may vary, offer void where prohibited, colors may vary.

And if all you wanna spend is for a Mini you deserve what you get. If this is for an office (meaning business), then buy business models, not housewife phone-desk models.

All it needs to do is text/photo editing. A Mac Mini will do.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

To be honest, we impulsively bought a Mini for our office because we had our first Mac graphics client in ages. It is doing the job for Illustrator work and MS Office projects. But other than simple image work in Photoshop I would prefer something meatier.

Also I'm grouchy because I can't afford anything new right now, and my Mac is a 5-yo G4 and my Dell laptop is 4 years old and slowly dying. Woe unto me.

You should see the Borgified setup I've built around the laptop. Using the keyboard shorts out the machine, so I have an old mac keyboard plugged into it. The optical drive only writes to CD so I have an external DVD burner, as well as no less than 2 external hard drives hooked up all the time, 160GB and 200GB.

I don't sweat the Mac as much because I don't use it often. It's in the living room where my roommate crashes on the couch, so I've let him run free on it.

There. I feel better.

 

[The Question]

Actually, my Mac choice has changed fairly recently, but not in any serious way just yet; whereas I'll be using a Dell XPS for a desktop solution, there are a couple contenders for the Mac:

Either a Mac Mini (for cost-to-use ratio) or a MacBook Pro for mobility. And since there are Mac versions of Power Structure, MS Office and Final Draft, shouldn't matter too much which one I finally go with.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

It's true the Mini is extraordinarily cheap for what you get inside. I'm waiting for Apple to realize what they did, and jack up the price to keep it in line with the rest of their machines.

 

[Cranky Bastard]

XP will suffice for non-gamers. Vista will be required to run all the Direct X 10 applications that are in the pipeline, i.e., Age of Conan.

The visual applications of Direct X 10 available only through Vista that I have seen are stunning advancements.

 

[The Question]

From what I've read, it's going to take a couple few months for that to happen. It's been claimed in an Engadget article that the Aero theme imparts a minimal-to-moderate hit on system resources (depending on your machine) which negatively affects gaming even on machines with DX10 GPUs.

Of course, do feel free to take that with a grain of salt, as Engadget has displayed some very blatant anti-MS bias (and very sloppy reporting) as regards the rumor that the Zune suffers from battery-heat-expansion/screen-cracking issues, an article which is presented with requests that the readership verify the claim.

 

[Cranky Bastard]

On regular systems, I would agree. Most of the newer chipsets coming out that are application designed are multi-cores, though.

I picked up a duo-dual core for the Harlot. With 4 cores running, Vista can take a whole chip on its own and still leave 3 for gaming - of which the most advanced might only utilize 2.

On my current one-chip system, Vista would be a waste - which is why I'm waiting to order up mine in duo-dual core as well.

 

[The Question]

Indeed. One of the reasons I'm a big fan of 2x2 as well as SLi.

 

[bad dog]

I was reading that the vista service pack 1 should be out by this summer. LOL

Macs just keep sounding better and better all the time.

 

[The Question]

Bah. I need to find an Apple Store near where I live to see how proficiently a Mac can actually get a job done. But I also need to find good hard data on reliability.

PCs I use on a regular basis almost never crash, but in the very rare instances where they do, I have the tools and skills to fix them myself. Can a Mac user say the same?

The best I've ever heard said is, "But they never crash!" Well, bull me some more hot, steamin' shit they don't. I've personally owned 2, both of which went to Deadtown without so much as a whoopsie-daisy. Granted, that was some time ago, but unless Apple has incorporated something resembling Safe Mode bootup and has made OSX an open enough platform to allow third-party diagnostic and recovery software, that problem still exists today.

 

[Gurk_MacGuintey]

I turned on my G5 Dualie 3 years ago and haven't given it a second thought since.

 

[Ishcabittle]

The best I've ever heard said is, "But they never crash!" Well, bull me some more hot, steamin' shit they don't. I've personally owned 2, both of which went to Deadtown without so much as a whoopsie-daisy. Granted, that was some time ago, but unless Apple has incorporated something resembling Safe Mode bootup and has made OSX an open enough platform to allow third-party diagnostic and recovery software, that problem still exists today.

Hold shift at startup = safe mode. Been that way since OS 7... all the way through Tiger and beyond.

OS X is built on nothing but Open Source software - look under the hood at the Unix side and you'll see everything is open source apps. OpenSSH, Make, VPN, OpenVNC, the works.

Think about Macs like this - there's this flashy and pretty GUI, dumbed down enough for grandmas and grandpas that no earthly clue, underneath that is a Unix core that can compete with come of the best Linux distros out there. There's a way to recompile any Linux source to run in Darwin, and therefore any app out there that you really want to have you can. You just have to dig deep.

As far as recovery - Archive Install has saved nearly every system I've worked with that needed a new OS, everything else has been hardware issues.

 

[The Question]

Ah, so there is a safe mode for Macs (though it doesn't sound like you're offered Safe Mode w/o Networking vs. w/ networking, etc.) aaaand you can, if I understand this right, port most Unix (Linux, as well?) apps to work on a Mac. Any way, in a worst-case scenario, to boot a Mac to a command line?

 

[Ishcabittle]

To boot a mac into command line, hold down command-S (the apple key and "S") at startup, that boots you into a command line as root.

Or, alternately, you can log in as "console" at the login window - that's command line there too.

Safe mode (shift at startup) is sans networking by default, and yeah, just about any Unix app out there will run on the Darwin BSD - you may have to remake the source, but most of them are straight dumps. I've got an old Powerbook running console-only duty right now, and even though it's slow as shit with a GUI it's holding its own pretty well with some serious stuff.