Forums | MacLife

well, it is a mac. that should be all the pro's that you need.  apples are more expensive, but the operating system and the experience make it worth your while, tiger has all the great things in it that vista has, without the bugs.  running tiger on a 1.83 intel would probably give you a much cleaner, crisper user experience then running windows on a 2.4.  also if your looking around the 1000 dollar price point, you might conside the imac, you would get a faster processor and you would be able to add more ram down the road.

i too would recommend an iMac, its going to be faster then the mini, though that HP is faster then all of them, as for pros, well how about this

OS X (stability/that whole virus/spyware issue)
iPhoto
iMovie
iDVD
GarageBand

i would think similar software in windows would run you $500 or so

I really like the front row in a mini.  I was hoping to be able to use it as a DVD recorder to record some of my fav movies on TV.  Can you do that easily with an iMac?

I was also hoping to keep it under $1000.  The 17" imac is right at our price range, through I have gotten use to my 20" monitor.  I have poor eyesight, so sometimes bigger is better.

Did I mention that the PC's come with a flat screen that is also 17" but the whole thing is only $859.00?  I'm not impressed, just worried hubby won't see things my way.  I'm going to show him the youtube demos of windows on a mac

You'll always be able to find a peecee that costs less than a Mac. You get what you pay for.

pottymouth wrote:

You get what you pay for.

Exactly.

Tell your husband you'll say "I told you so" everytime he complains about rebooting, viruses, spyware and so on.

What are you both going to use the new computer for?

What does he want to do with it?

Note that the low-end PC towers are very limited in how much "upgrading" you can do with processor, RAM, etc. Additionally the upgrading is limited as well to HP approved and guaranteed parts, that will work without "problem" when installed.

Compatibility problems will be encountered for a year or three with Vista until the software and hardware drivers are all updated.

The games that he plays, if some are comercial then you would benefit from at least a 17" iMac with either an ATI Radeon X1600 with 258MB RAM or the Nvidea cards, which are in the 20" and 24" iMac. But if he isn't a big game player the 17" should work fine. If he plays games that are only available on Windows, then the 17" iMac is still fine, you just need to download BootCamp and get a licenced version of Windows W2K or XP. Usually XP Pro is the desired OS.

As for the harddrive, it makes a whole lot more sense to get an external USB or Firewire drive. The USB external drives are cheaper. Then you get 160GB internal and optional 250 or 500GB internal drives. The external drive is nice because the space can be used to backup your internal drive and also be used for data storage. You can partition the external if you get a 500 and allocate 250 partitions, one for backup only and the other for data. Or get two 250GB HDs external and to the same thing.

Redundancy is important for businesses. Additionally, the 17" iMac with the 2.0GHz, which I am recommending, has a superdrive which lets you burn DVDs. DVD discs can contain data, so there is another redundant backup for your data.

And subscribe to Apple Care if you are squimish. I've never needed mine. All the bad things that have happened to my Mac have been cause I did stupid things.

With a Windows box you WILL slow down with spyware, malicious code, viri, etc. You will ALWAYS have to dedicate resources to making it clean and safe. With a Mac you don't "right now," that might change if the hackers decide Apple is a good target. But for now you are immune to 99% of all the bad things out there.

P.S. Denali, I grew up in Ft. Collins

Last edited by sturner (2007-02-12 4:57 pm)

Pariah wrote:

sosumi wrote:

In today's market of ever increasing processor speeds, no one upgrades their computer anymore.

So ever increasing CPU speeds is a new thing???
And nobody upgrades anymore? This must have just happened cuz I was browsing some tech site and I saw lots of upgrade parts for sale.

Odd.....I would have thought to upgrade market completely collapsing would have made the news.

CPU upgrading is still a viable market.
it's the GPU upgrades that's getting tough.
AMD/ATI isn't putting out AGP cards for the Mac anymore.

Jasoco, tell your dad that the price for computer support on the Mac is much less than that for Windows. Oh, and don't forget to hand him the bill for that support next time you are called upon to troubleshoot.


I'm not a young woman either.

Denali wrote:

So if I am running windows on my mac and we get into a nasty web page that has a hidden virus will it affect my computer?  Or because it's superior, will it be unable to affect the machine?

At about the time you discover your Intel Mac is infected, you'd be thinking how much better an infestation of Devil's Club would be.

Denali wrote:

So if I am running windows on my mac and we get into a nasty web page that has a hidden virus will it affect my computer?  Or because it's superior, will it be unable to affect the machine?

depends, if your dual booting then it means windows has control of the entire drive, at that point it is possible for a windows virus to damage/modify data on the Mac partition, but thats all it can do, and luckily most stuff out right now isn't interested in damaging data on your computer, they just want to control your PC/give you ads/and steal your info, and because of that the chances of a windows virus doing anything to your Mac install is almost zero, but its still possible, if your running inside a virtual machine using Parallels or VMWare then control of the underlying hardware is ultimately controlled by OSX and contained by the VM, so all a virus would do to your mac in this case would be take up disk and cpu, it would have any other effect on OSX

in both cases however, the virus/bad software would run as normal and do all the normal stuff you don't want in windows and monitor everything you don't want it to do, but it will stay in windows (unless you happen to get something that likes to reformat random parts of your drive and your dual booting, it could make OS X unbootable, again this won't happen when running in a VM, and the software out today generally wants you to not know its installed, and will try and keep a low profile by not damaging anything, so its very unlikely anything bad to OSX would happen)

maleko wrote:

no.

if using boot camp, windows cannot infect the mac partition because windows cannot read or write hfs+

in other words, viruses/malware on windows cant effect your mac, PRAM may be corruped, but that can be fixed by a simple keystroke

I just said its possible, when dual booted windows has direct read/write access the drive as a whole, if some type of malware gets administrator privileges in windows it is certainly possible that it could exploit that read/write access, it knows that there is a partition there and it can do what it wishes with it, i don't know of any software out there now that would damage it, because like i said, thats not what they want, but there is plenty of stuff out there that will open up an IRC server and your computer will use that to give attackers admin access to your computer, the attacker can then reformat the "Unknown Partition" for their own use, or download an HFS+ driver onto your computer and start messing with files

i don't think its something that is likely to happen, but there are a lot of different types of malware out there, and many will just hand over control to some guy on an IRC server and let them do anything, and you don't know what someone will do once they start snooping around in your computer, its easy for them to see that your installed on a 30GB partition but have a 120GB drive, it looks like your hiding something, and thats a good enough reason for them to find out what needs to be done to read the drive (or just get pissed at you because they can't figure it out and zero all your data away)