PhilBiker

Vista's a year old!!! "just came out?"

chrislo

Yea out of all the commercials on TV and in general I find the Mac commercials the most annoying.

Compared to XP which has been out for years? Yea absolutely. Not to mention XP has much more penetration compared to Vista.

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Computer Spec's: Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4

Windows XP MCE 2005 SP2 (TV Tuner Card)
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One thing PC users can do that Mac users can't do...

imsati

The TV ones get a bit old after a while, but there are some great spoofs on You Tube! South Park, Linux vs MS, BSD vs. Linux.

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--Jay
Gigabyte EP31-DS3L | E4500 | Masscool HSF paired with AS-5
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Also, I can kill you with my brain.

The Great Forum Challenge
http://www.computerforum.com/114761-...tml#post922619
(And you follow his advice why, exactly...?) (Funny Thread though!)

chrislo

Yea those are funny.

__________________
Computer Spec's: Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4

Windows XP MCE 2005 SP2 (TV Tuner Card)
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.46GHz (2 CPUs HyperThreading)
3 GB's of Ram
2 80 GB Hard Drives
ATI RADEON X850 Platinum Edition 256 MB
SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio

One thing PC users can do that Mac users can't do...

tlarkin

That is physically impossible, considering boot camp only runs on Tiger in beta form and on top of that only on intel based hardware. It is developed to run only on x86 hardware.

The reason why Leopard and Tiger are faster than windows is for several reasons. The first and foremost reason is almost an illusion. If any of you have a background in Unix/Linux you will know that things like initd are used as system daemons that launch processes at boot. Well, Apple took a 30 year old OS and basically redesigned it. They came up with something called launchd (launch daemon) and it takes care of everything and runs as PID 1, system level process running as root on your system. When OS X boots and you see that progress bar, that progress bar goes by really fast, and doesn't actually really represent anything being loaded in the background. The OS comes up very fast and snappy, however, not every item is available to use or launch yet. If you have every booted into OS X and immediately launched FireFox, you will notice that it takes a few seconds to run the first time. This is because even though you are booted into aqua (OS X's GUI) launchd is still launching services. It launches them by priority, need, and request. So really technically you do not have every single process running yet when you go into the OS but the required ones are running. It is the same thing with windows but a different approach. Instead OS X just boots the minimal things up so the OS can start and once you are inside it is still running. Pretty good idea IMO. Windows makes every start up item load first, which is why it has way longer boot times. Now, once in the OS you can launch firefox and launchd will run it. Since all new systems have dual core processors they can easily distribute jobs and firefox can still rather quickly, but not instantly be launched right at start up. Safari runs even faster.

Secondly is memory management. OS X uses unix based memeory management that will on the fly allocate both System memory and virtual memory to the current resource being used.

Of course, third is vista's fault with high spec requirements and memory management. vista preloads everything into memory that you frequently use, but it doesn't do such a good job of allocating it on the fly. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is because unused ram is pretty much a waste, so why not use it right? I see where MS was going with this one, however, you leave some room for multi tasking.

I know I am far from an average user, but my typical work load is several terminal windows up, work group manager, system tools, remote desktop, several tabbed browsers, email client, some sort of text editor, some sort of media player with music playing, server tools, etc. So, I have probably 10 to 15 applications running at all times when I am working.

On the windows side I have used novell and MS products in the past. Though novell is solid (as in pretty stable) its performance is far below that of the Mac platform. Microsoft's solution though robust on the serer side, also seem a bit lacking on the performance side. They are not by any means terrible products, and Apple products are by no means the best, they are just different. I will say that OS X does seem faster and more responsive over any other OS I work with (novell, Linux, MS windows, OS X, etc).

When you look at every OS out there and look at the requirements and how you can get lots of cool 3D features to perform very well on lower specs than Vista, it is really the OS's fault. I can get the same 3D effects and better performance off a system with 1gig of RAM on Linux and OS X, but with Vista to get the same performance I need at least 2 gigs of RAM and most likely a better video card and maybe even a faster processor.

It mostly has to do with resource management. Also, to add to the level of why vista has failed as far as sales go, is because really enterprise sales drive the market. Companies and organizations look at vista and immidiately think, hmm if we decide to upgrade we will need to add a gig of RAM to 6,000 computers....What are the benefits of upgrading??? Hmm, none really, so we will stay with XP. It is microsoft's fault that they have such high requirements. When you are dealing with 1000s of computers you don't just upgrade them all and let it rip, that would be extremely irresponsible. You need to test it, find out if your current infrastructure can handle it and then assess upgrades and other options. With about 10,000+ computers at my work, there is no way we would roll out Vista any time soon. Just think of doing 10,000 RAM upgrades before rolling out an OS...have fun with that one. So that is why not everyone is ready, willing, or wanting to upgrade to Vista; that and all the bugs that haven't been fixed.

XP is faster really only by certain aspects. If you have a boat load of RAM and have fully vista compatible software and drivers, technically vista should be faster. However, the problem is getting fully supported (and non buggy) software for Vista.