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skinbag · 05-19-2004, 11:29 AM

I own a Mac G4 and a Dell Inspiron 8600, and the Mac is waaay more stable in terms of uptime and unexpected lockups and shutdowns. Even though the G4 is a 3 year old 733 mhz (and 640MB RAM) and the Inspiron is a 1.5 Gig Pentium M (384 MB RAM) the Mac wins hands down. Every night I "sleep" the Mac and every morning it wakes at 7. I only restart after updates to OSX, (which happen less frequently than on XP thus far, and have never caused a problem). I suppose I could restart, but why?
On XP I perform weekly cleanups, defrags, and Adware purges. The updates are shaky and I have had one trojan horse virus in 8 months. None of these "routine" tasks take much time, but collectively they could be considered a pain in the ass. Luckily I actually like dinking around with my laptop, but I doubt most users do.
Although I respect the above posts, I just don't see any truth to the notion that the two OS's are equal in terms of stability. XP rarely locks, and OSX has only locked on me when I erased the master password file then restarted (imagine that..) or while I was running Explorer for Mac. OSX has not hung up once since the debut of Safari.
And on the rare occasions I want to be a "Power User" the Unix core of OSX is soooo much easier to use than the DOS commands in XP. DOS is poorly documented, and I have yet to find any use for it other than reformatting the drive, while the man pages on Unix are self-explanatory for the most part.
The small keyboard on a 12" powerbook might brive you nuts, and I would get a REAL mouse straightaway. (I can't understand the single-click logic either..How can Apple make such a great OS and stick to such a pain in the ass input device is beyond me!)
If you restart often as you carry your laptop around and you don't mind maintaining your OS, XP is functionally adequate, but to say XP is as stable as OSX is simply not true in my experience. I keep my computers in my living space and see a difference in stablity that is probably not apparent in computer labs or little "test drives", so no offense to above posters, I think they just don't LIVE with but OS's enough to notice the stability thing.

05-19-2004, 11:29 AM	#28 (permalink)
skinbag Registered User Location: Madison WI	I own a Mac G4 and a Dell Inspiron 8600, and the Mac is waaay more stable in terms of uptime and unexpected lockups and shutdowns. Even though the G4 is a 3 year old 733 mhz (and 640MB RAM) and the Inspiron is a 1.5 Gig Pentium M (384 MB RAM) the Mac wins hands down. Every night I "sleep" the Mac and every morning it wakes at 7. I only restart after updates to OSX, (which happen less frequently than on XP thus far, and have never caused a problem). I suppose I could restart, but why? On XP I perform weekly cleanups, defrags, and Adware purges. The updates are shaky and I have had one trojan horse virus in 8 months. None of these "routine" tasks take much time, but collectively they could be considered a pain in the ass. Luckily I actually like dinking around with my laptop, but I doubt most users do. Although I respect the above posts, I just don't see any truth to the notion that the two OS's are equal in terms of stability. XP rarely locks, and OSX has only locked on me when I erased the master password file then restarted (imagine that..) or while I was running Explorer for Mac. OSX has not hung up once since the debut of Safari. And on the rare occasions I want to be a "Power User" the Unix core of OSX is soooo much easier to use than the DOS commands in XP. DOS is poorly documented, and I have yet to find any use for it other than reformatting the drive, while the man pages on Unix are self-explanatory for the most part. The small keyboard on a 12" powerbook might brive you nuts, and I would get a REAL mouse straightaway. (I can't understand the single-click logic either..How can Apple make such a great OS and stick to such a pain in the ass input device is beyond me!) If you restart often as you carry your laptop around and you don't mind maintaining your OS, XP is functionally adequate, but to say XP is as stable as OSX is simply not true in my experience. I keep my computers in my living space and see a difference in stablity that is probably not apparent in computer labs or little "test drives", so no offense to above posters, I think they just don't LIVE with but OS's enough to notice the stability thing.