I can’t believe how much I’ve fallen in love with this little iBook! Every time I touch my windows laptops (yes, I still have them – they have their uses) I feel like I’m Captain Caveman plunking away on a stone-age keyboard, waiting very long times for things to start up and very short times for things to crash.

Then there is the sheer volume of information on the internet about how to do things and how to tweak things and how to make magic with a mac! Mac users are proud of their investment and want to share their experiences, but I hardly ever see PC users writing anything positive about their PCs apart from their first post after they’ve just bought it, after which it’s all complaints and security issues, etc., etc. As far as I’m concerned, PC stands for “Pretty Crap”, but in this world we just have to live with them. Thank God MS foresaw the future when they decided to make their PCs “Preemptively Compatible”.

“Mac has that really annoying ‘Eject’ button on the keyboard, forcing you to buy another Mac keyboard”

Is a prime example of those PC idiots who diss Macs without knowing what they are talking about.

The same brigade who claim there is no software for the Mac – again this is repeated rumour without actual investigation on those that claim this.

I find that many PC users who diss the Mac have never even used one, and those who diss the Mac who owned one 10 years ago have never used a recent one.

I mean comparing the Mac 10 years ago to a PC of today is like comparing Windows 3.1 or 95 to Windows XP ffs.

There are several ways you can eject a CD without the keyboard button. Idiiot.

There are also several games for the Mac including Age of Empires/Mythology/Sims collection/Star Wars collection/Battlefield collection/Call of Duty collection…I could go on!

Before any PC user comments on the negativity of owning a Mac, do me a favour – either use one for a while and then comment or do some research!

The only people worth listening too are those who are using or have used both platforms regularily – and yes, I have.

… not being able to play videos on a projector etc. It’s just a matter of how you do the settings. Certainly if it’s using an Intel series graphics chip, it can only display on one screen – but it’s not locked to which one it uses. Switch from using “display clone” from the laptop screen to the projector, to using it as an “extended desktop” (this will also allow you to better suit the screen resolution to each device). I’ve just checked this by setting the laptop up with the external monitor, and in extended desktop mode I can play a video and move the player from one to the other. It plays fine on both, but if set to straddle across, the one with less than 50% of the video just has a black panel (the video’s still playing full screen on the external monitor while i type this in the laptop screen). If it was simply cloning one to the other, there would at best be arsing about setting the projector as “primary” rather than the laptop (so you get the black panel internally but the video still plays on the projector), at worst total failure. Again, it’s all about using it properly.

The point abou getting excited over a ford mondeo… well, its about how you view it. Are you going to have an Alfa that you trick out and “pimp”, or a sturdy workhorse that’s boring but gets you to work every day? And what of the Mondeo ST24? I’d have one of those in a shot.

So long as the software i’m using isn’t a pile of pants – and often even when it is – I’ve had windows systems run for ages, days, weeks at a time, particularly when on a major P2P binge. They certainly last longer than certain workplace Solaris Unix machines I could mention. Even my old 98 box was generally quite reliable (even against 9x’s intrinsic resource leaks) but not really economical to leave on, though I did so for a while with Folding@Home. Previously the laptop has run for about a virtual month without being properly shut down (hibernating, standby etc – part of why I’ve switched to a portable is to reduce the overall energy use in my life e.g. 9 watts instead of a couple hundred); now I’ve got Folding finally reinstalled on here I’ll get to see how stable it can be running at full whack (20 or 30 watts max) for weeks on end.
One surprising thing I found – Firefox can really upset your system. It chows down on resources like a complete bastard. Opera is much kinder; hell, even IE is, if you don’t mind the security holes. And if you go overboard with the tabs and overload your physical and virtual memory, you can save your session and shut off the program, with a few moments grace to hit stop-all and close a few tabs when re-opening, saving your ass from operating system armageddon. Again, proper choice of programs which won’t destroy the machine; the Solaris box being another example of this, as even it’s Unixosity wasn’t immune to some of the bugs in the thrown-together medical imaging applications we had to use.

I suppose it all adds up to just another windows user banging on a diatribe and a defence of why they use the system, but i don’t see why mac users get so hung up on us doing so… Many of the reasons given in the post directly complaining of this were actually fairly valid, rather than blind denials. Don’t be so swift to tar us all with the same brush and we’ll do you the same favour. After all, Mac was the original highly popular GUI home computer, why else would there be a reputation for snobbishness unless it had been earnt?

I also recognise the futility of replying to a 6-ish month old post, but hey… why the hell not. I’ve got a lot of built up internet constipation. Haven’t done board posting in far too long, meaning this sort of excessive nonsense occurs.

Cheers and goodnight. I think I’m going to watch the rest of the film that’s playing on the second monitor of my low-end-graphics Wintel PC Laptop :-)

Re: Connecting to wireless network being easy with Mac…:
Me sets up wireless router in house. Me turns on laptop and presses the button that enables previously useless built-in wifi circuit. Wintel laptop + Windows XP effortless finds and logs onto network. I am browsing internet less than a minute later. I later find out it is able to pull the same trick in my grandmother’s flat, as one of her upstairs neighbours has wifi also.

Re: People choosing what’s best for them AND MS Word running better in OSX. Err, no it doesn’t. This actually reminded me that in the run-up to buying this miniature beast, I DID check out the MacBooks in Comet, and then finally wandered into a full-on Apple Shop so I could have a proper play with one. Including office applications. I wasn’t impressed, especially after looking at the price, and walked out again. For starters, it can’t do full-screen, which I occasionally like to use so I can see the whole page AND edit it at once (something I got used to simply to have readable full-page-width text when previously using a VGA-resolution laptop and a *1994* version of Word – 12 years later and Apple still doesn’t have the option). Several other features were also missing or at least hard to find, but that was the killer for me, especially as the interface unavoidably chowed a lot of screen area.

Accented characters in Windows? OK, I’ll accept it’s more difficult, but it doesn’t take long to learn the Alt+nnnn codes for the (very) few you need to use; acute accents are simply Alt Gr + the appropriate letter (for UK keyboards); and MS Word, maybe even windows itself? also offer a piss easy method of character composition (vs the already fairly simple method of using Character Map or Insert Symbol)… can’t call it to mind right now as I don’t have to use it like ever, but it’s something like “press the letter you want accented, then AltGr or Ctrl-Alt plus the punctuation symbol key that most resembles the accent”… e.g. A plus the colon key gives you umlaut-A, O plus 6 gives you an O with a little hat on it, etc. A bit easier to use than the apple method of typing in the modified sound it produces (which i sure as hell WOULDNT remember)

Viruses, slowdown and all. Funnily enough my own personal computers don’t suffer from this much. Maybe because I use half decent (yet totally free) antivirus software and protection utils rather than the lobotomised shit that is supplied with most machines – and requires payment to use after six months – or pirated, badly, and never updated, by the average user. And I don’t act like a putz with my PC. Anything that’s going to be installed is vetted, and deleted if it’s no good or invades the system, rather than sitting there to clog everything up forever more. On the other hand, I’m forever having to “repair” the PCs of various family members who more or less take a virtual shit all over the operating system every other time they go online and download some shiny toolbar or instant messenger add-on. For these guys, I WOULD reccomend a mac, assuming that macintosh itself is immune from this idiocy.
After all it’s not just the OS but the way that you use it. You could have the nicest car in the world, but it’ll still be a wreck after three years if you abuse it and never service it (old Mac users – remember having to “rebuild” the desktop?). Whilst the VW Polo I had for my first car was twelve when I first had it, fifteen when I sold it, and a lovely ride, if a little slow and short on luxuries – mostly surviving that long because it was looked after.
I think in my life I’ve had to deal with a grand total of about six virus events. One on my own PC when I first connected to the internet and didn’t know about all the security stuff, and my first AV package picked up something thankfully benign. Four others on other people’s machines (two each from usual suspects who also suffer from a lot of slow running etc…). One on the Atari from a dodgy floppy.

Multimedia and creativity applications, etc. I don’t know about you, but the PC seems to be swimming in the bastards. I used to do a lot of messing about with audio and video at university – all of it through a fairly modest 850mhz Duron *PC*. This laptop came supplied with more free trials of art, video, etc software than I knew what to do with (mainly because of the built-in graphics tablet that offers similar functionality to one of those $2000 wacom jobs with the built in LCD… hmm!), and that only got worse when I installed the copy of Nero that came with the DVD writer. I’ve got all this brilliant stuff that’s offering to turn my home videos into sumptuously laid out DVDs at the connection of a USB 2.0 lead, a click of a button and the insertion of a blank +R disc, but no time to actually make the content or watch it once it’s burnt. On the odd occasion I have the free time it’s almost exclusively spent in living many experiences and taking some photos to look at in my old age, rather than endlessly reliving a smaller number of them and boring everyone stiff with them.
(Maybe the Mac users lapping this stuff up have empty enough lives and heads to be able to properly enjoy the experience? :D)

But … for all that, the idea of it being an easy way of getting some kind of Linux-like OS in my life without a great deal of hassle (even if it IS BSD-based and a bit crippled) is a bit inviting. One to bear in mind if I feel like giving linux a serious bash in future. Y’know. If I find a compelling reason to.

PS I’m currently grinding through an ECDL course online… do current Macs and their browsers support Authorware? I don’t know either way. But if they don’t, that’s one lifestyle enhancing thing I’d be short of. Also as far as I’ve heard, Mac Opera poops on Safari from a height… guess what browser I’m using on my PC :)
(ahem, apart from for the ECDL that is – the player only works in IE or oldskool Navigator, in PC land, because authorware is just a touch out of date compared to flash)