This Question is for MAC and WINDOWS users....

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Greetings,

This post is not to start a mac vs. windows war! I definitely enjoy using my mac but since the beginning i have noticed that surfing the web on a ibm thinkpad 1.3 celeron 256mb ram is faster than my ibook 1.2ghz with 768mb ram. I use both operating systems so I'm not bashing either or cuz both of them have strengths and weaknesses. is the speed issue based on the operating system or processor in this instance? even using Microsoft Office 2004 i find it a bit sluggish compared to the Windows version.
 
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meltbanana314

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Both. The small bus of the PowerPC G4 7450 can't compare to even Celeron processors. Freescale really sucks at making processors. IBM's PowerPC 970/FXs trounce AMD64s though (wow, it looks like a flame war is going to start anyway...)

The main differences between the OSes are that Microsoft has a lot of time and money to cobble together a fast, insecure, unstable OS that people write fast, insecure, unstable apps for.

Apple, on the other hand - made a good decision by using BSD Unix + Mach as the foundations of the OS and making a secure, stable, and functional OS that happens to run a bit slowly. I'm sure by the release after Tiger, OS X will be on par with Windows XP or Longhorn (if it even will be released) as far as speed goes.
 

iWhat

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As far surfing the web on a mac, I do think some browsers on the mac lag a little. You should try Camino in your comparison and see which one is faster. I don't know, if Camino will do better, but it seems to me that Camino is somewhat faster than browsers.
 
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SogniX

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What browser do you use on Windows?

Internet Explorer for Windows and sites hosted with Windows IIS do a cheat that makes them establish a connection and communicate faster than normal. Making it feel faster.

Try a different browser on Windows (or a site that you know is not hosted on Windows servers) and see if you still feel the same.
 
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scott_allan

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I find Safari to be much better than Internet Explorer, however when using a browser like Firefox on my PC it tends to be on par or faster than Safari.

I have found the same problem you mentioned with Office.. granted I spend my working days on a PC using MS Office, so I'm much more used to that environment.. but there's something about Office on Mac that just doesn't seem right.

I haven't tried out the iWork suite .. but I've heard very good things about it.. I trust Apple can make a better suite of programs than Microsoft anyways.. they're much less buggy and have nicer interfaces.
 
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Whew!

Glad this didn't start a flaming war of mac vs windows! Well I figured it was more of the OS than anything else in regards to computing speed as well as intel processors are generally known to be faster than the g5's. BUT yes I would say Mac OS X seems to be more stable than XP, although I haven't had many problems with XP. I just find that i do not get laggy performance on my Mac after using it for hours as i do with XP. i just spent like 2 hours downloading and debugging my cousin's windows xp machine which was full of spyware and crap! that's the main reason why i went Mac, sick of the security issues with Windows. I hope to get Tiger when it's released! And i do gotta try out the Apple office suite to check out it's performance. any reviews?
 
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btw, i'm using mozilla firefox. i used camino but didn't notice much of a difference and i like firefox definitely more than safari cuz i found safari slow! don't use internet explorer.
 
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meltbanana314

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Computer.Geek said:
intel processors are generally known to be faster than the g5's.

Not exactly...

G5s have wider buses than P4s. The new P4s have 1066MHz buses and they don't really have any speed advantages over the 800MHz bus models. As of August of last year, PowerPC 970FX processors have 1250MHz buses.

G5s are pure 64bit w/ 32bit backwards compatibility (sort of like AMD64s.) P4s are pure 32bit with a 64bit emulation layer (EMT64) implemented, which is not as fast as pure 64bit.

The G5s are faster, and have some great advantages over x86-based processors.

Plus, PC Magazine benchmark a while back was totally biased against the G5. The only fair comparison was Photoshop rendering times, and the G5 was only a second or two behind the AMD64.
 
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warrenbert

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I use Firefox on both an iBook and a centrino/Windows XP laptop. I think the limiting factor is still your network speed.

For web-surfing, I really like the scrolling touchpad of my Windows laptop. Windows laptops have had these types of touchpads for many years now. I noticed that the new Powerbooks will begin to have scrolling touchpads. I wonder if we can buy the touchpad parts and install them on our iBooks?
 
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You can either use the shareware app called 'Sidetrack' to enable scrolling, or search for a hack that enables the 'new' feature on older powerbooks and iBooks.
 
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warrenbert said:
I use Firefox on both an iBook and a centrino/Windows XP laptop. I think the limiting factor is still your network speed.

For web-surfing, I really like the scrolling touchpad of my Windows laptop. Windows laptops have had these types of touchpads for many years now. I noticed that the new Powerbooks will begin to have scrolling touchpads. I wonder if we can buy the touchpad parts and install them on our iBooks?

I did the software hack(search google for apple trackpad hack) and its wonderful! Don't be intimidated by the terminal you know! It sure was worth it!
 
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Computer.Geek said:
btw, i'm using mozilla firefox. i used camino but didn't notice much of a difference and i like firefox definitely more than safari cuz i found safari slow! don't use internet explorer.
You should also be aware that Firefox on the Mac is not optimized yet and there are still many Mac-specific issues that weren't fixed for the 1.0 release. 1.1 will address most of those so using it to compare speeds at this point isn't going to be completely accurate.
 
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warrenbert

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Thanks for the tips on the scrolling thing. I will give them a try. I suspected there was an easy solution since PCs have had scrolling trackpads since at least my first 100 MHz Pentium laptop from about 15 years ago. Don't ask me what I paid for it unless you want to make me cry!
 

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