poor service/support from HP

[BrianG]

And Mac doesn't play all my games.

I suppose you could use a vmware virtualizing windows, but that just sucks.

My g/f and I had this debate a number of times. I am a PC fan, she is a Mac fan.

The gaming conversation:

- Me: "Argg! Where are the good games in this thing?" (looking at her Mac).
- Her: "Computers are for work, consoles are for games. If you want to play a game, go play the Wii or whatever".
- Me: "Yeah, and you have a house full of hardware that can be replaced with one PC. Beisides, I have to get up and go upstairs to play the Wii. The computer is right here. Why can't Macs be an all-in-one solution?"

The graphics argument:

- Her: "I need to do some graphics work".
- Me: "Just do it on the PC. It's got the software and hardware to do it".
- Her: "But it works better on the Mac".
- Me: "Huh? How so? Exactly what part of Photoshop works better on the Mac?"
- Her: "It just does. I know all my shortcuts using the apple button".

About virus software:

- Her: "Why do I have to update my virus program everytime I turn the PC on?"
- Me: "Because new definitions are released to deal with the latest viruses out there."
- Her: "I never have to do this on my Mac."
- Me: "Only because hackers don't care to program them for 10% of the computer population".

About hardware (specifically, her old iMac):

- Me: "What's that squealing sound? The CPU fan?"
- Her: "I think so. You should replace it."
- Me: "Oh no I'm not! If Macs are so great, you stick your fingers in there. Just be careful for the flyback transformer." (hee hee)

And so on and so forth...

The one thing we DO agree on is that stupid single mouse button. WTF!? Good thing she's using a "real" mouse... and a MicroSoft one at that!

[TexasSP]

I went through the HP saga and they have poor support. I also have been through apple's service because my wife has an apple laptop and their support was very poor also. They continually wanted to blame every problem on the existence of pc's. Basically they refused to fix the problems or admit they had any problems. According to the Apple/Mac store techs everything works perfectly and if it doesn't it's a pc's fault.

Personally I can't see how her computer locking up and losing files has anything to do with pc's.

On the support front I agree with VintageMA on the XPS as their support was to notch for me. I will also note that dell's higher level support with the standard business product lines is top notch as well.

That was beautiful Brian!

[VintageMA]

Originally Posted by BrianG

And Mac doesn't play all my games.

Actually - you should consider looking further into using bootcamp and VMWare Fusion with an XP load. It's really very impressive.

It allows you to run what they call "Unity" where your windows apps show up as application windows within the Mac desktop.

There is also a support for DirectX 9 within the virtual machine so that you can play a windows game through the VMWare session and the speed is suprisingly good.

It is important when using VMWare though to have performed a boot camp installation - that way you hard a section of the physical hard drive reserved for just Windows - rather than virtual disk file that could get fragmented across the drive and end up slowing everything down.

[BrianG]

Honestly, the games I currently have aren't all that power-intensive. But I doubt she's gonna let me possibly wreck her iMac (OSX) to test this. And she only has less than 1GB of a 10GB disk left. She also has a G3, but that's down right now. May look into getting that up and running and trying the bootcamp/VMWare thing.

[VintageMA]

Originally Posted by BrianG

Honestly, the games I currently have aren't all that power-intensive. But I doubt she's gonna let me possibly wreck her iMac (OSX) to test this. And she only has less than 1GB of a 10GB disk left. She also has a G3, but that's down right now. May look into getting that up and running and trying the bootcamp/VMWare thing.

Sorry Brian should've asked for specs first. I would say that you should be on Leopard 10.5.2 or higher with at least 10GB free HDD and a few GB of RAM to try this.

The one thing that is impressive (btw - sorry to hijack thread to talk about Macs) is that at least Apple makes an effort to support Windows and help a person's transistion over to a new OS, whereas M$ couldn't care less.

[BrianG]

Believe me, if I could dump M$ altogether I would! Their stuff is too expensive (especially the office suite!) for what you get. I flat out refuse to go with Vista. What a piece of CRAP! Talk about tons of code that does nothing except consume resources!

I tried the dual boot Linux thing, and while it worked ok, I never got the video performance from whatever video card I had, so the game that did work, worked poorly.

[Arct1k]

It is much easier to design and build an OS / drivers when you control every bit of hardware in the system - OSX is fine but it is hardly an open OS.

I'm not sure what the rave about bootcamp is - It is really just a hack to get past EFI BIOS. From there out you are actually all MS working on apple hardware... MS should get the credit! They allow there software to run on Apple... Try OSX on a Dell.

I know MS is a big company and has its challenges but in general they've hit the mark with the software...

IIRC the research shows Vista has had less security defects than OSX... http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=758&tag=rbxccnbzd1

PS I have a PC's and a mini mac which is my media PC connected to my PC. In the last 2 years I've had to rebuild from install disk the Mac twice the PC never. My PC scarily has been rather stable under Vista 64 - The only crashes have been memory errors due to very tight timings and a heavy overclock.