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The Worm has Turned again - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2009

Time for a Big Mac Well, actually we started with a little one, the diminutive Mac Book Pro 13". The aim is to get our feet wet with a possible objective of moving away from Windows for much of what we do. We have already shifted our stance when people ask, 'What computer should I buy?' Our policy is to reply, 'Go buy a Mac' for the simple reason that we can be sure that having done so we will probably not hear from them again.

Contrast this with giving advice on buying PCs when you eventually become the guilty party for things that go wrong/don't work/lose a wedding set of files, etc! As the provider of the original free advice you now become the provider of free support, all hours of the day, all days of the week, a contract with no get-out clause.

Here is what we have found about the world of Mac 2009, so far:

Sometimes it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what irritates you when working with a computer. Most frustration comes from waiting for things to happen. The time it takes Vista to start up is mind-numbing and something that has to be endured at the start of each working day. On a machine with 16x more RAM, 8x more processing chips and less than half the age, Vista takes twice as long to start up as my old XP MESH laptop (purchased January 2003). The Mac operating system is many times more efficient than Vista.

Hence everyday activities such as booting up and file transfers are far more slick. The Dell scores heavily when pixels have to be ground up in some way, but the benefits you gain here might be lost while you have been waiting for files to transfer from your CompactFlash card

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, computers have to be set up, loaded with software, configured for printers, connected to the Internet, and so on, before you can use them. To this end we put a big clock on the wall and did some real world configurations of real machines used by real people On the following pages is a comparison between setting up a Mac Mini and a Windows PC (Both brand new and still in their boxes). We also include some sage advice about things we have found out along the way. On the previous page we have listed our benchmark testing of the various systems from around the office. On this page and the next we discuss the issues around file naming. As a topic it is as dry as dust but if you exchange files between systems you have to know how to make it painless!

Aside from file naming there is the issue over fonts for multiplatform documents, a topic which demands its own feature. Then there is the issue of external hard drives and pen drives.

An external drive such as the Western Digital MyBook is not normally formattted to FAT 32 (it's nomally NTFS) and this brings issues if you plug the drive into both a Mac and a Windows machine. They can be shared over a network and there are utilities to allow you to use the drive on both operating systems. You will only have read-only support if you plug a Windows external drive into a Mac. The best advice is to avoid plugging an external drive into more than one type of operating system unless you are either an expert or have one looking over your shoulder!

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1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:50

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