I
iain
Guest
I've had my 17" power book since Xmas and although some things about it are first class, in particular the screen (I'm an engineer and regularly have need to pull up and review drawings). The built in speakers are the best I've heard, for the first time it is possible to not only watch a movie but listen to it properly as well. For all that it has not been a change without problems. There is no doubt that OSX is much more stable than any version of windows that I have used, the system has not crashed once (so far) but the lack of any proper exchange server clients is a serious pain and in a large corporation you cannot just ring up the system administrator and ask him to enable IMAP for you, which leaves only the option of using Outlook 2001 (outmoded, outdated and unstable). As yet I have not found any alternative to continuing to use autocad and Access in VPC, which doesn't seem to run as well in Panther as it did in Jaguar even with 512Mb of RAM allocated. I've looked at Filemaker but it doesn't seem to do things in the same way as Access plus I have a ton of legacy stuff that I cant import and while exporting to excel is ok for tables the whole point of the databases is to maintain you structured queries etc. Project management software seems to be sadly lacking for Macs as well. I suppose most of these are application issues rather than strictly Mac ones but in the real world if you can't run the software you need "natively" then the whole exercise starts to become somewhat futile. I thought that the finder under Jaguar was simply rubbish and although it's better with Panther still falls short of explorer for ease of use. System preferences is another case in point. Can anybody out there tell me how to make a global change to default file associations my biggest bugbear is PDF's I do not want preview as the default but so far have to change this to Acrobat file by file and with several thousand engineering drawings for a project to go through is a major pain. So to anyone from an engineering environment thinking about making the change I would say think long and hard before making the investment paticularly at UK prices, powerbook £2300 upgrade Ram to 1gig £250, usability compromised. What you do get is a stunning piece of design that is very well made, particularly when compared to a similarly priced Dell inspiron (which I owned previously) that handles all regular office tasks with ease (Though I would kill to have my delete key back) but starts to struggle in a more specialised environment. For the most part the actual change was painless and no more dificult than changing to a new maufacturer of a car. Didn't take me long to throw away the stupid one button mouse though. I really don't subscibe to the the whole Bill is satan and Steve is great thing after all a computer is simply a tool that lets one get through far more in a day than was ever possible previously. Now if someone was to make a machine that was as well deigned and built as my power book and had dual processors one G4 and one P4 then I would be beating a path to their door.
