how do windows users do it?

[Groovetube]

I know, smacks of a fanboi thread. But man. I spent all day in windows xp, and 7, running simulators for blackberry for a mobile project, and using many different browsers and working within it. I started off a happy person this morning. I just took some tylenol, and I want to throw my computer through a wall.

Except, I can unboot the windows and return to os x. No wonder apple is slaying right now. Is microsoft really this inept? really? I thought win 7 was a marked improvement, until I had to put it through it's paces.

 

[pigoo3]

I know, smacks of a fanboi thread. But man. I spent all day in windows xp, and 7, running simulators for blackberry for a mobile project, and using many different browsers and working within it. I started off a happy person this morning. I just took some tylenol, and I want to throw my computer through a wall.

Except, I can unboot the windows and return to os x. No wonder apple is slaying right now. Is microsoft really this inept? really? I thought win 7 was a marked improvement, until I had to put it through it's paces.

Believe...I know exactly how you feel. I've been "messing around" with a used Windows laptop the past few days that's going to be a Christmas present for my father-in-law.

- Installing the OS
- OS updates
- ram upgrade
- HD upgrade
- adjusting the "Set Up" settings
- messing around with the "Bios"

I get a BIG FAT headache when I mess around with Windows stuff!

- Nick

 

[Groovetube]

I've always tried to be open to other platforms, but man.

My mom, a senior who is very ill, wants a laptop, and is fiercely loyal to windows. I think because of the games, or simply being stubborn. But unfortunately being her son, I'm also stubborn.

I'm bringing her my ipad loaded with all her favorite games and leaving with her to play with.

Because I know I'll get a call 6 months later to reinstall, and there's only one thing worse than installing windows, installing it on a laptop.

 

[harryb2448]

Leave your Mom be and let her enjoy her computer. Windows 7 is a pretty good operating system and remember XP is yolks old and OS X.2 and X.3 were not that crash hot.

 

[iggibar]

You know what almost made me do a back flip recently? We bought my cousin a new Asus i5 laptop with Windows 7, and it had 40 flipping updates! OMG! When I buy a new computer, I want it to be up-to-date! I had less updates on a fresh install of Leopard on my dad's new(old) powerbook 17...maybe 5 or 6 updates max! I haven't used windows at an exclusive level since I got my MacBook Pro, so it drove me up a wall!!!

 

[pigoo3]

You know what almost made me do a back flip recently? We bought my cousin a new Asus i5 laptop with Windows 7, and it had 40 flipping updates! OMG! When I buy a new computer, I want it to be up-to-date! I had less updates on a fresh install of Leopard on my dad's new(old) powerbook 17...maybe 5 or 6 updates max! I haven't used windows at an exclusive level since I got my MacBook Pro, so it drove me up a wall!!!

Because the laptop my wife & I got her father is a 2007 "vintage" laptop...I thought that it would be best to install Windows XP (he has a lot of old software as well). It was Windows XP SP2 I installed. After the initial install...there were 75 updates. Then I downloaded Windows XP SP3...and then there were something like another 68 updates.

No nice easy "combo updates" like there are from Apple.

It was a longgg process...but everything's good now.

- Nick

 

[MacDude121]

I'm a Mac OS X user to the core, and I've been stuck using a Windows Vista laptop for the past 2 months. Seeing as my iBook is on it's last leg, and I sold my PowerMac G5, it's really the only viable option for doing any real computing tasks.

I went to update it, and it said estimated time: 1 hour. 6 hours later it finally finished updating.

I need a Mac...desperately.

 

[dtravis7]

MacDude, what is wrong with your 1.33Ghz iBook? Mine is still as good as the day I brought it home from the local Mac store.

 

[MacDude121]

MacDude, what is wrong with your 1.33Ghz iBook? Mine is still as good as the day I brought it home from the local Mac store.

It's just getting old. It wasn't in the greatest shape when I got it, and since I, or some member of my family, has been using it every day in the past year and a half, it's not looking so hot.

-The HD has a really bad rattle to it, might go soon.
-The battery lasts about 2 minutes before it shuts off, so it has to stay plugged in.
-Sometimes the backlight just randomly goes off, but usually comes back on after a restart.
-The latch is broken, so the lid doesn't stay closed anymore
-The optical drive doesn't eject disks anymore. I think it might be the casing around the slot itself, but I'm not entirely sure.

Probably more than that, but not much I can think of off the top of my head. It's served me well, and still works, but it's just about time to upgrade I think.

I'll probably keep it around though. It's not worth selling seeing it has so many problems with it. And it still works as a light web browser, which is fine for my parents and brother to use.

 

[Groovetube]

windows 7 isn't bad. But man, it's clunky with all the overdone animations, and I HATE, did I say hate? I really really despise IE9. I haven't yelled ranted and raved at a computer this much in a long time. I actually booted up XP to run the blackberry simulators, and they worked, but win7, I just about lost my marbles.

But this goes back to the days when I dropped windows, I was once a fire breathing mac hating windows using pc building firebrand. I had a mac friend I would always enjoy taunting. I had to buy a mac years ago for web testing, a beige G3 300MHz, at the time I had a 1.2GHz pc for my work machine, one morning on a hard deadline, it blew another gasket, unintelligible crap on booting, something about recovery blah blah, so I took my work and put it on the beige, downloaded trials of the (then) macromedia stuff, and got my work done. I went to a mac shop and bought my first real mac, a MDD dual 1 gig. My friend cried victory.

I used to have an old ibook, something about those things, they tended to look pretty battle worn after a while.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Leave your Mom be and let her enjoy her computer. Windows 7 is a pretty good operating system and remember XP is yolks old and OS X.2 and X.3 were not that crash hot.

I wanted to like Windows 7. I tried to like it. But the UI is a chaotic mess. I have to use a 3rd party utility just to bring sanity to the Start Menu alone. I honestly don't get why people think it's so great.

 

[Deckyon]

I come from a Windows background, and still use it at work every day. My work laptop is Windows XP SP3 and it works well enough. Being a work laptop, I do not do my testing on it, I have other machines for that.

My parents have their own computers that I maintain. I have finally got them to stop hitting every "scan you computer now, you have a virus" window that pops up. My dad's computer is a Dell Inspiron from 2007 with Vista 64-bit. It works, and I have yet to have to do anything but clean up some temp files (normal for ANY computer) and apply patches - I have it set to notify and I have him call me when there are 10 updates. My mom's PC is an HP Voodoo (my old one) with Windows 7 64-bit and I rebuilt it before I gave it to her. Same process with that one as well. They have a shared HP 27" touchscreen desktop that is set up to do the updates on its own - they use it for storage and my mom does her photos and business documents and books on it for their real estate properties. On all of them I have AVG Free and Windows Defender running. So far, I have had to deal with 3 viruses since 2007 on their machines. The key piece to all of this is LogMeIn.com is on every one of them. I rarely have to go over and do anything.

On my own MBP, I still have Windows 7 installed in Bootcamp. It will be there until I have no need for it. That is coming, I am getting latest Final Cut Pro for myself for Christmas to replace Sony Vegas. My last app to replace is Photoshop CS3. That one will be hard to replace. I lost the (they were stolen from my bag at a coffee house) original install disks and cannot get the switched license without them (spent 2 hours on the phone with Adobe about it.) However, I have found that I have not been using much more than Aperture in the last few months anyway, so it may be time to reclaim my drive space...

When it comes to Windows (XP, Vista, 7) it all depends on how you use it. It will let you do, literally, anything. It is a nice draw. You can change the look/feel so much easier, and really, especially Windows 7, is an easy (comparatively speaking towards the older Windows versions) OS to learn and use.

Will I never buy a Windows machine again? No, not never, just not soon.
Will I only ever buy Apple machines from now on? For myself personally, probably.
Will I recommend Apple over Microsoft to others? Depends on the person.

All computers, regardless of chassis or OS, run on the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle. They do nothing more than what we tell them to do.

 

[Deckyon]

I wanted to like Windows 7. I tried to like it. But the UI is a chaotic mess. I have to use a 3rd party utility just to bring sanity to the Start Menu alone. I honestly don't get why people think it's so great.

That is just your own experience. My 73 year old mom went from XP to 7 and I have not had a single call from her beyond "How do I install the new wireless printer I got?" in 9 months.

Exactly how long did you work with Windows 7 before "you had to install a 3rd party app"? Anything less than at least 6 weeks is not enough time. I switch OS's with my job enough in the last 16 years I have gotten used to rewiring my thought processes. ****, my first desktop OS was SGI's IRIX on an Indigo workstation.

 

[iggibar]

What I don't like about 7 is that they tried to make opened apps easy to find by grouping them into those menu squares, but it looks like a mess to me. I like the old style from XP. You can change it though, from the view options, but in doing so, you have to wonder, what makes Windows 7 different from XP/Vista?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

That is just your own experience. My 73 year old mom went from XP to 7 and I have not had a single call from her beyond "How do I install the new wireless printer I got?" in 9 months.

Exactly how long did you work with Windows 7 before "you had to install a 3rd party app"? Anything less than at least 6 weeks is not enough time. I switch OS's with my job enough in the last 16 years I have gotten used to rewiring my thought processes. ****, my first desktop OS was SGI's IRIX on an Indigo workstation.

I rarely use it. I boot into it once in a great while, and even then for a specific task. I'm not unaccustomed to Windows. I was using it regularly from late in the life of 3.1 well into the life of Windows XP before I grabbed a Powerbook on a lark and Mac OS 10.2 won me over. I have little doubt I could tweak and continue to tweak Windows 7 more to my liking in time, but honestly I hate it. It annoys the living daylights out of me. Even Windows XP, as much as I grew to "dislike" it, I don't find as cumbersome to navigate and use at work.

At first I was attracted by the various color options and the UI "candy" look, but in time I realized that it was just distracting. I spent more time going "oooh… how pretty" and less time actually doing anything. This is not a positive thing.

 

[JUKE179r]

I've had Win7 on a partition of my MBP for a year now. IMHO... there are too many bells and whistles for my liking. I only use Windows for business files that don't have a Mac Application to open them and to use my CAC card for specific DoD websites.
I wish I could go back to WinXP Sp3. ;D

 

[cptkrf]

I know, smacks of a fanboi thread. But man. I spent all day in windows xp, and 7, running simulators for blackberry for a mobile project, and using many different browsers and working within it. I started off a happy person this morning. I just took some tylenol, and I want to throw my computer through a wall.

Except, I can unboot the windows and return to os x. No wonder apple is slaying right now. Is microsoft really this inept? really? I thought win 7 was a marked improvement, until I had to put it through it's paces.

Same here. I had had it with Windows after helping a school upgrade all their XP software over a summer. Insert the CD, key in a massive number, answer some questions and wait. Then reboot, log in to the network again, insert CD, key in some numbers... On and On for about ten packages on 600 machines. The automatic process for license entry didn't work, despite many ad hoc patches from the support centers on an hourly basis, so everything was manual. Then of course were the frequent BSODs and the problems that package A changed settings that package B didn't like and, of course, with the writers of package B telling us that it is a package A problem and vice versa.

In my case, I switched to Linux for a few years then finally on to OSX.

 

[SFBloodBrother]

That is because Apple likes to make things simple for you. It's just you get it, and it is all up to date, and you just use it.

With PC's, you do not actually get to use your new PC on the first day you get it. When I got my laptop, I had to spend about an hour and a half setting up the computer, with all the updates and anti virus and the scan which took like 2 hours, I did not use it on the first day,

Though I do not have a Mac yet. I sure hope I just just use it right when I get it.

 

[cptkrf]

Though I do not have a Mac yet. I sure hope I just just use it right when I get it.

Actually, coming from Windows, your first few days with a Mac may be more difficult than you expect. You might try to make it more difficult than it really is.

I recall my first one - a mini that I bought to see if I actually liked Macs. I had a couple of ordinary run-of-the-mill HP lasers that needed to be hooked up and I must have clicked and looked and googled for an hour trying to find the darned printer install icon. Then more googling to figure out what driver I would use when I finally learned how to install it.

Finally, I noticed (in the dock or somewhere) an icon that was the exact picture of my main printer - it had already been recognized and installed and worked perfectly - and without splattering the filesystem and desktop with the unwanted HP bloatware utilities that are so hard to avoid with Windows.

I had been used to click-through plug and play in XP and manual installs in Linux, but this was a nice surprise and an indication of the smoothness of OSX.

Just back off and let your new Mac lead you along - don't try to force it to follow your Windows experience.

 

[Chris H.]

Actually, coming from Windows, your first few days with a Mac may be more difficult than you expect. You might try to make it more difficult than it really is.

I recall my first one - a mini that I bought to see if I actually liked Macs. I had a couple of ordinary run-of-the-mill HP lasers that needed to be hooked up and I must have clicked and looked and googled for an hour trying to find the darned printer install icon. Then more googling to figure out what driver I would use when I finally learned how to install it.

Finally, I noticed (in the dock or somewhere) an icon that was the exact picture of my main printer - it had already been recognized and installed and worked perfectly - and without splattering the filesystem and desktop with the unwanted HP bloatware utilities that are so hard to avoid with Windows.

I had been used to click-through plug and play in XP and manual installs in Linux, but this was a nice surprise and an indication of the smoothness of OSX.

Just back off and let your new Mac lead you along - don't try to force it to follow your Windows experience.

Coming from using Windows for about, oh, 12 years, back in 2009...this is exactly the problem I ran into...until I learned that the Mac had just about everything I needed from the get go.

However, when someone asks me about what new computer they should get, I ask them how much they're willing to spend - if it's less than $1000, I lead them to a decent PC - one with at least 4 gigs of RAM and a 500 GB HDD. Anything less than $500 and I ask them what's wrong with their current computer.

I use a quad-core Windows 7 laptop for playing games...my MacBook just can't really handle some of the games I play...even with 8GB of RAM...