Quote Originally Posted by piper View Post
Hello, I'm an IT Consultant myself. At work we use Windows XP, at home I have Vista. The only reason I have Vista is because it came pre-installed with the laptop I have now.

The problem people have with Vista, is they say it runs slow. Well the reason is plain in simple, Vistas graphics are a lot more demanding then XP. When I first got my laptop it only had 1 gig of ram in it (2 512 sticks). All I did was go out and buy a 2 gig($55) stick of ram and pop it in, update the BIOS and I was good to go. If you don't update the bios, you may see the blue screen of death.

It does seem annoying after a while that when you try to install a program/application on your computer, it asks you permission to do so. Yes that is annoying, but it also does this for removing programs/drivers, anything like that. I was cleaning up my computer one day and almost uninstalled the VideoCard driver for my computer, but because it asked permission, I obviously said no.

There are little things here and there, like compatibility with programs. A lot of programs won't run on a MAC os. Someone I know, went and sold there laptop for a MAC, and I warned them before they did so that a lot of the programs they use, will not work on a MAC. They didn't care, they tried a MAC and thought it was great. 2 weeks later he sold his MAC and now has a laptop with XP on it.

For me it's not about personal preference, it's about what I can do with my computer. For me, I have no use for a MAC. Yes I have used them, and no I don't like them.

For however much MAC laptops are going for, read the specs of the computer itself. 80 gig hard drive, 2 gig of ram. You can double that or more, if you buy a pc with vista/xp on it.

The macbook air, $3500.00. Doesn't even come with a cd-rom, needs to be bought seperately. People think Windows are all about making the money, but look at price differences compared to what you can potentially get in each.

One more thing, if you install XP on your MAC at the same time as the mac osx, that's taking more space of the tiny hd's that come with macs. So no, it's not really beneficial to install XP and the mac os both on the same machine.

That's all I have. Sorry.


Anyone with a big corporate logo(not your own small business or something similar) tatooed on them is a gigantic tool in my book unless they are a ceo or own the company etc...

As far as running XP on a Mac, my sister's laptop had a 120gb hard drive and I used the minimum 32gb size for XP. She basically runs office, windows photoshop and other similar programs on there and the rest on mac OS. Its the best of both worlds since she's not limited by one system.

And I agree with you on cost as I mentioned before. When you buy a mac you're paying for a brand name and you're stuck with mac everything. With a PC, you have a ridiculous array of products/support to choose from. So you pay double or sometimes triple for a machine of equal capabilites for all intents and purposes.

Now, I still love the macbook laptops but I can get a nice web browsing/word processing laptop for like $400 that'll do everything I need it to just fine. For graphic heavy stuff/games I see no point in a laptop unless its your only computer. This is where the PC really shines from a price standpoint as you can get a very nice one for under a grand. Like I mentioned before I can build a pretty good dual core AMD based machine for about $600. This is basically just pulling the mobo/video card(I don't have to change the vid card but a radeon 9600 is just not getting it done anymore) and ram and replacing it with a new mobo/video card and ram. Oh and a new heatsink.

Vista does have massive memory loads compared to XP but ram is so dirt cheap now that it should never be an issue. I still do find Vista to be pretty buggy which is why I prefer XP but it'll get worked out in a year or so. Remember when Windows 2000 came out? By the time they got a few service packs out it was a really great OS. I used it for quite awhile with no issues from 2001-2004. Support is there, Microsoft isn't going to just sit there and let Vista lose to Leopard, they'll tweak/upate/fix and stay competitive.