Apple INTEL Macs

Fintan,

To follow-up on your comments above, I will reformat my problematic DELL laptop with a fresh copy of Win XP and reinstall my image acquisition and processing software ... nothing more. I will leave the new Mac laptop for everything else including surfing.

Hopefully under such a scenario, I can have the best of both worlds as you mentioned earlier.

I dont have any problems with the windows user interface. its different from OSX, not necessarily better or worse. when i got the mac first it drove me nuts until i got used to it. its just a matter of getting used to using it.

It's less efficient and more cluttered. More clicks to do the same thing, lots of superflous text and clutter, particularly in explorer and in the control panel. Having to read too much does my head in. A picture says a thousand words and all that.

You also have far more consistency across all apps. I simply adore the way just about all Mac apps look like Mac apps, no matter who wrote them. They also all work the same way. There are standard places for things and 3rd party developers follow them too.

Power user heaven, you can re-arrange the menubars in just abotu all apps and add in more stuff. Just right-click and click customise. You can drag and drop file and folders you need to get at easily into the menubar of the finder as well as the side bar.

Then you come to the now fabulous in-built search. It's fantastic at finding documents but it does way more. It's a great application launcher, a dictionary and a calculator, all one click or one two-key key-combo away at all times. Then QuickLook. View documents without opening applications. Select the file and hit spacebar. That's it. Effectively instant previews.

Then Exposee. f8, f9, f10, f11 and f12, I'm lost without them.

I also cant see how OSX is more advanced than windows, i actually find it more basic. windows has much much more, if you need or want it is up to you.

Don't consider this an exhaustive list by any means:

1) Exposee
2) Spaces
3) SpotLight
4) QuickLook
5) TimeMachine - effortless built-in backup
6) The Core components which give all developers access to the cool graphics and animations that make the Mac so nice. Thanks to the core libraries developers can do imensly complex graphics stuff on the GPU of any Mac that has one with a simple function call. That's why we have so many great creative apps on the Mac
7) The iLife Suite. Powerful photo, video, music and web editing out of the box as well as iDVD for creating DVDs with menus and of course iTunes.
Automator - drag-and-drop automation. Programming without the need to type a character
9) Apple-script - powerful but insanely simple programming allowing automation of just about every app on the Mac
10) Certified UNIX - all your fancy Unix software and services and a proper command-line
11) Built-in X11 - all your favourite graphical Linux and unix apps on your Mac

You get the idea. It's a pretty powerful OS which is way more feature-rich than Vista. It really is power-user heaven. Windows just doesn't let me work as efficiently as OS X does when you get to the stage where you are using all the optional power-features.

with regards to the Mac community, i find them more like extreemists. mostly if you mention windows within 100 yards of most of them you will be stoned as if you said Jahova in the life of brian. seriously, mention windows on any mac forum see the flame war that starts. that kind of blind faith is completely useless and unhelpfull.

That is the case on some forums but not all. Thank Christ! The communities that are established around the new regular-user apple podcasts are much friendlier. I'm happy to be an active part of that community contributing regularly to two such podcasts. They're not about Windows bashing and some even feature Windows software and many have a real love of cross-platform software.

I will agree with you on the virus scanner issue, but as mac becomes more popular, i garuntee that sooner or later you will need a virus scanner for the mac. see where it is in 5 years in relation to this point.

I don't think so. The focus in security has shifted. The focus used to be on fixing flaws in programs so the baddies couldn't expliot them. Now the focus is on exploitation prevention. Basically hardening the OS so that flaws in programs can't be used as back-doors into the OS. The big steps forward on this are:

1) Sandboxing
2) Data Execution Prevention
3) Memory Randomisation

OS X does all three, as indeed does Vista. It's been a year, have you seen a major worm of the Code Red or Blaster level affect it yet? Nope. I was listening to the Network Security podcast last night and one of the hosts says he doesn't run AV on Vista or OS X for the same reasons. Both OSes are hardened agaisnt exploitation so they are much safer by design than XP or the other windows versions. I'm expecting this trend to continue. As the OS makes it harder and harder for flaws to become expliots the threat will shift back to the more traditional things like email attatchments. Common-sense is enough to protect you from those kinds of threats, you don't need AV chewing up your RAM and CPU for that!

I may of course be wrong, but I'm seeing encouraging signs that I'm not ... and some people who are way smarter and who know way more than me agree .. so lets hope!

The fact that windows has so many viruses targeting it is due to its popularity. why would a malicious coder spend their time coding a virus that would only affect 5% of the pc's in the world when it can target 95% of the pc's in the world.

Mac make up 14% of consumer sales in the US according to numbers that came out this week. That's getting pretty signifficant. Internet statistics are showing that about one in ten web surfers is now on the Mac. It's fast becoming less obscure. I think a signifficant factor is now the fact that OS X is a more difficult OS to exploit than XP because it does DEP and all that jazz while XP doesn't. XP is dominant so it is doubly screwed, it's easier to attack, and there's more XP machines out there. Should Vista take off then things could get a lot more interesting. Vista is much more hardened than XP.

I have to repeat myself, im not pro windows, im not pro OSX, but i am against bashing windows just because you have found a "different" operating system that doesnt give you the troubles windows gives you. you delve deep enough OSX will give you plenty of problems.

There are imperfections everywhere. I have a shopping list that I'd love to be able to give Steve Jobs of things I want changed, added, removed and fixed. Thing is, my list for Steve Balmer is WAY longer. And don't get me started on my list for the RedHat people

I actually think that the more of a power user you are and the more of a sys-admin type you are the more advantages OS X starts to present. If you're never going to use any of the power features then they may as well not exist!

Bart.

Fintan,

To follow-up on your comments above, I will reformat my problematic DELL laptop with a fresh copy of Win XP and reinstall my image acquisition and processing software ... nothing more. I will leave the new Mac laptop for everything else including surfing.

Hopefully under such a scenario, I can have the best of both worlds as you mentioned earlier.

If you keep the XP machine off the net and avoid installing anything you don't need it should be fine. It should just let you get on with image aquisition and stay out of you way.

Bart.

eh well, each to their own bart, unless your a mac extreemist i mentioned earlier : In which case i whole hartedly apologies for saying windows in teh same sentence as OSX, apologies for even considering windows as an OS im not going to bother compiling such a list as you have done here. its not worth it. you sound like an IT pro, you are most likely aware of the good points of windows but chose to ignore them.dedicate yourself to one system, and when you get stung, no need to tell anyone, just remember this conversation...

eh well, each to their own bart, unless your a mac extreemist i mentioned earlier : In which case i whole hartedly apologies for saying windows in teh same sentence as OSX, apologies for even considering windows as an OS im not going to bother compiling such a list as you have done here. its not worth it. you sound like an IT pro, you are most likely aware of the good points of windows but chose to ignore them.dedicate yourself to one system, and when you get stung, no need to tell anyone, just remember this conversation...

Actually, I'm the Windows networking expert at work. I know more about the bowls of Windows than I want to and a lot of it unsettles me. Vista is a step in the right direction from a security point of view. It's just a pitty it's so insanely bloated and that it didn't actually add anything significant to the user interface. It just make it all a little prettier and a LOT resource hungrier, that's it. I have high hopes for Windows 7, but only time will tell.

I'd also like to think that I'm by no means a zealot. I do really like OS X, but unlike zealots I know why I like it. Ultimately it lets me get more done with less effort. I also have no objection to people mentioning Windows. I have a professional exposure to Windows, Mac and Linux. Right now Mac is the leader of the pack in my professional opinion. That may change.

Bart.

Fintan,

To follow-up on your comments above, I will reformat my problematic DELL laptop with a fresh copy of Win XP and reinstall my image acquisition and processing software ... nothing more. I will leave the new Mac laptop for everything else including surfing.

Hopefully under such a scenario, I can have the best of both worlds as you mentioned earlier.

If you keep the XP machine off the net and avoid installing anything you don't need it should be fine. It should just let you get on with image aquisition and stay out of you way.

Precisely. I will use a lower capacity hard drive since the number of wares to be loaded is minimal and it will be strictly for image acquisition and nothing else.

Question: When reloading Win XP on an existing Win XP hard drive, does the software load the OS on specific tracks, thus effectively only overwriting the previously loaded OS and thereby leaving the user files (software and data) in tact or is the whole hard disk initialized prior to the new reinstall? I know with previous versions we had the FAT (file allocation table) which described the name and physical location of each file on the hard disk and which was overwritten (ie. initialized) with any install of the OS.