Quote:
Originally Posted by hulkrogan
Vista was WAY easier to get everything configured/running (getting my MacBook to print was a 4 hour exercise) and I've had more crashes already with my MacBook than they have with Vista in a few months.
The biggest problem with Vista is third party software/drivers.
It's not light years ahead of a windows machine like most mac users (who always seem to act like they invented the Mac or own a billion shares in the company and therefore defend them to the death) will tell you.
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1. If your Mac is crashing, as you put it, there is something wrong with the Mac, period. They are very stable. Most of the applications you find out there are pretty stable to. On the whole, I find that the Mac shareware scene has consistently higher quality apps for what you pay, although that's a landscape also littered with awful apps on both platforms too.
2. The biggest problem with Vista is not third party drivers, its a broken driver model that puts drivers in the kernel where failures (and failures happen, no matter how well written a driver is) can take down the whole system. This is actually getting better in Vista than it was in XP, with more driver code running in user space (print drivers, especially), but there is still a good chunk of driver code that runs in kernel space.
3. I agree, the Mac isn't light years ahead. Lots of features that people crow about, like Time Machine, are already in Windows. Microsoft calls it "Previous Versions" and "Volume Shadow Copies", and as a result, the average user has no idea what they do, where to find them, or how to use them effectively. The key value that the Mac platform brings is the integration and polish of these features. I can ship a USB hard drive to a computer newbie in another province, tell them to plug it in, flip the huge Time Machine switch in preferences (and its literally a huge visual toggle switch), and now they have backups, and I don't have to worry anymore.
Printing on the Mac does suck, its terrible. No argument there.