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Re: Mac or PC's? |
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| message from John Gaver on 16 Jul 2004 |
I have high end WinTel PC's, high end Mac's and hand-me-down Linux boxes and
a BSDI-based firewall. I could use any platform that I want, for my
graphic/image work. I do all of my design work on a Mac.
The most powerful graphics and image apps all take advantage of the Mac's
graphic speed (floating point) enhancement features. If you use Photoshop,
Illustrator, PhotoRetouch Pro, etc. there is no comparison. The Mac is still
head and shoulders above the PC. On some non-graphic apps, the high end PC's
can marginally outperform the high end Macs. But, on those graphic intensive
apps, the best PC's don't even come close to the Mac. Furthermore, most
people who use PC business apps seldom have more than three or four windows
open at a time, so they don't put a real load on the PC. Graphic designers,
OTOH, typically have a dozen or more windows open at the same time - a
process that will require a PC to be rebooted daily, if it doesn't crash,
under the load. I just did an Expose' on my Mac and I have 27 windows open,
not including tool bars and that's typical for me. The last time that I
rebooted was weeks ago, when there was a kernel update that required a
reboot. WinTel boxes just won't handle that kind of load on a daily basis.
John Gaver
Action America
(forget everything to contact me direct)
Microsoft: (n) Job security for IT consultants.
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| John Waller replied to John Gaver on 17 Jul 2004 |
Graphic designers,
On a Win 9x/Me PC with modest RAM I'd agree.
On Win XP Pro with 512MB/1GB+ RAM you can work reliably with plenty of
windows open.
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| John Gaver replied to John Waller on 17 Jul 2004 |
I have two WinTel boxes, running XP Pro and both have 1GB of RAM. Neither
will reliably run the 20 to 30 window load that is typical of either my
768MB Mac or my 1GB Mac. Both Macs are rebooted only when there is a kernel
update, requiring a reboot to become implemented, which is rare, compared to
XP. The best that I have ever been able to get out of either of my WinTel
boxes, has been a little over a week and that was after another consultant
friend of mine, who has just about every Microsoft certification you can
get, spent two hours going through the setup and registry of a new HP that
kept crashing after only a day or two of heavy work. I managed to get it up
to about a week and my friend managed to give me a few more days, on top of
that. But, opening and closing windows on a WinTel platform, will ultimately
crash the system. I just got tired of losing data. Even though I had all of
my applications set to backup every 10 minutes, the d@#n XP Pro system
always managed to crash 9.5 minutes after the last backup. Furthermore, if
Dreamweaver crashed and XP Pro didn't crash, it would cause so many problems
that I would have to reboot within a short time any way. The same for
Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc.
On the Macs, the apps seldom crash and the system never crashes. They stay
up for months. Even on those rare occasions, when an app crashes, the system
doesn't crash and I don't have to reboot. The worst that happens is that I
might lose the last few minutes of work, ONLY in the app that crashed. The
thing that finally moved me over to Mac, was when Photoshop crashed, during
a scan, on the PC and caused the whole system to lock up. Two important
files, representing hours worth of work that day, were corrupted in OTHER
applications and I lost the most recent updates in 9 more files, NONE having
to do with Photoshop. That just doesn't happen on a Mac.
On top of that, my wife has a login on both systems and they stay up all the
time, as well.
Don't get me wrong. I really like Microsoft. If it were not for the poor
quality of their products, I would not make nearly as good a living as I do.
I hope that they stay around for a long time and keep putting out junk. It's
like my tag line says, they provide job security for consultants. But, as a
consultant, who considers his time to be valuable, I keep most of my mission
critical work on Macs, with databases on Linux. After all, every hour that I
would have to spend rebooting, fixing and generally fighting my own systems,
is an hour that I wouldn't be able to bill to a client. I work on PC's. I
get work done on Macs. My only regret is that I didn't switch to Macs
sooner. It would have saved a lot of headaches.
John Gaver
Action America
(forget everything to contact me direct)
Microsoft: (n) Job security for IT consultants.
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| John Waller replied to John Gaver on 17 Jul 2004 |
Fair enough John. Point well made.
Your experience differs to mine.
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