Dell or Imac

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Originally Posted by vnx205

I know that a lot of people, especially Mac users say a lot about intuitive interfaces, but my few attempts to use a Mac have all been a complete disaster. Absolutely nothing worked the way I expected it to. Perhaps my brain has been addled by starting off with CP/M and DOS.

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RSTS, MUMPS, CP/M and VMS 2.1 where the first OS I used so, yes, I know what you are talking about. That said, not everyone is happy with each OS. I must also admit I found the Mac OS X frustrating when I first used it, but like I have said for those that are poor with computer skills the Mac is definitely better than Vista.

I'm also surprised you have troubles as one of the things I like about the Mac is you can do almost (possibly all) everything from keyboard commands which is rather good.

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Originally Posted by Bigmark

No lie, i used pc's for many years and still use them at work alongside Macs. Pc's have many many driver issues,hardware conflicts, software conflicts and the list goes on and on. I am still waiting for the final fixs for all the problems and coding errors in XP but they gave up and went to Vista- then they gave up and are trying windows 7.
Face it they cant keep up with the 100's of different configurations of machines to run all the Pc software .
If you installed windows and are trouble free then you never connected to the internet or installed new software or fitted new components.
I am sick and tired of going around to mates houses to help them connect to their Wifi. Does anyone know why it only works sometimes.
Mate ill cut you some slack because you are a landy person but if i ever meet anyone with a windows machine who doesnt have problems" ill go buy a toyota landcruiser" the windows version in the fourby world, and you guessed it-- the landyrover Defender is the MAC.

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Guess i must be the luckiest bloke in the world then, although I must confess that I do not run Vista and refuse to have anything to do with it. I have a laptop belonging to a local business on my desk at the moment to undergo a devistectomy and have XP installed.

Nope PCs are not perfect, but they are merely more useful than the alternative

I'll think I'll keep my "Swiss army Knife", and my Land Cruiser, another thing that runs first time everytime.:)

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Originally Posted by black betty

We got a Mac a year ago and have had no problems.

It just works, all the time, every time.

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^^^^

That's the one.

And when it does have a sook (with a lot of big apps open at once, like Word, Photoshop, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, etc) all being used to create a report, a restart sees you back on the job in less than a minute with nothing lost.

cheers, DL

Well, I'm new to Macs - I use a Unix based workstation at work (I'm a Scientist), as well as PC's. At work - we don't use any Macs, but we could - any software in the world will run on one actually.

However, I understand some users will not want to run windows (and emulators to drive Unix software) on their Macs - so these users might have software limitations in a work environment. But for everything else - it's the Mac all the way.

And to suggest that a Mac is limited in available software might be technically correct, but I feel this statement too is quite misleading, as I have endevoured to explain above. One glaring area though, where Apple software is very much behind the PC, is in the market for virus fixes, malware fixes, etc software - there is plenty of this software for the PC - not much for the Mac! :tease:

And depending on what you do - Apple software is, in many cases, far superior to offerings running on PC's - an issue that is really beyond debate. Have a look and see how many Journalists, for example, prepare magazine spreads etc on anything other than a Mac.

Other benefits? A Mac is much more stable - you won't get memory leakage and need to reboot it every few weeks. Even when you do reboot - it's quick.

You won't get viruses, malware, Spyware etc nor need to buy all the fixes and associated software.

You will have a user friendly, intuitive interface. And, for the average user, you likely won't need to buy any software - the Mac comes bundled with good, usable software straight out of the box.

And another thing - the Mac changed the face of computing - if we hadn't had Apple invent the icon based visual interface, we would all be typing out comands at amber prompts still (which wouldn't really worry me, but hey - I'm a little different!).

I say try it - Macs sell themselves.

As I said, I am new to my Mac - but as it is a Unix based operating system, perhaps there is a Shell I can access to manage files etc - not that the finder is in any way inadequate - I'm just familiar with using Unix script. I don't know - i haven't bothered delving into it yet that far.

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Originally Posted by Scallops

And another thing - the Mac changed the face of computing - if we hadn't had Apple invent the icon based visual interface, we would all be typing out comands at amber prompts still.

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I'm sorry, but that is just not true.

Get a Mac and you can put the secret handshake in your signature "". Only readable with a Mac!

Oh and you can do stuff. Tonight I downloaded pictures from my SLR, edited some video and exported to DVD along with doing some design work for my job. Sure all these can be done on a PC but for me it's more comfortable on the Mac. I just seem to spend more time being productive but if you're happy on a PC then go for that.

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Originally Posted by Ferret

I'm sorry, but that is just not true.

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Don't be sorry, Ferret - because my statement is in essence, completely true. OK - Apple didn't technically invent the visual user interface - but Apple were the first to put this type of interface onto computers for the consumer. Look at all other computing platforms when Apple first produced it's macintosh computer - none were using any form of icon based visual user interface - they were all command line driven. It might hurt - but the Windows world was yet another Apple innovation, again, copied by the men who come behind....

Macintosh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see McIntosh.

The original Macintosh, the first commercially successful personal computer to use images, rather than text, to interface with the user.

The newest revision of the iMac, Apple's mid-range computer since 1998.
Macintosh, or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface.....

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Originally Posted by vnx205

I know that a lot of people, especially Mac users say a lot about intuitive interfaces, but my few attempts to use a Mac have all been a complete disaster. Absolutely nothing worked the way I expected it to. Perhaps my brain has been addled by starting off with CP/M and DOS.

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How long did you spend trying? Please tell us all!

I got my first Mac 4 or 5 years ago and I'll admit I had a couple of nights of wondering how it all worked. It's just when you've been using one arse about product (MS) for so long it does take a little while to re-adjust.

Did you know that macs are UNIX based and that if you want to you can do pretty much everything from the command prompt? Did you know that UNIX has scripting ability that is in another league to even the current implementation of MS-DOS? I can't remember that much about CPM though as it was so good it didn't make it!

So many untruths on this thread in general. Luckily I am not on my own anymore! :D

Last login: Tue Jul 28 07:09:24 on ttys000
powerbook58-2:~ $ uptime
7:12 up 18 days, 8:04, 3 users, load averages: 0.41 0.25 0.34
powerbook58-2:~ $ uname -a
Darwin powerbook58-2.local 9.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0: Tue Mar 31 22:52:17 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.12.14~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
powerbook58-2:~ $ ps -eaf |head
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
0 1 0 0 0:35.63 ?? 0:46.71 /sbin/launchd
0 10 1 0 0:03.06 ?? 0:08.54 /usr/libexec/kextd
0 11 1 0 0:23.13 ?? 0:33.45 /usr/sbin/notifyd
0 12 1 0 0:07.86 ?? 0:15.00 /usr/sbin/syslogd
0 14 1 0 0:31.79 ?? 0:46.67 /usr/sbin/ntpd -c /private/etc/ntp-restrict.conf -n -g -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -f /var/db/ntp.drift
0 16 1 0 9:48.98 ?? 9:49.22 /usr/sbin/update
0 17 1 0 0:00.01 ?? 0:00.01 /sbin/SystemStarter
0 20 1 0 0:07.03 ?? 0:28.35 /usr/sbin/securityd -i
0 22 1 0 7:52.93 ?? 16:09.54 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Support/mds
powerbook58-2:~ $

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Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

Did you know that macs are UNIX based and that if you want to you can do pretty much everything from the command prompt?
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Oh - that is way cool! How do I access the command line? (there goes finder - I'm back!) :D Thanks for the info, Captain - I thought there would be this functionality but I just hadn't found it yet.

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Originally Posted by Scallops

Oh - that is way cool! How do I access the command line? (there goes finder - I'm back!) :D Thanks for the info, Captain - I thought there would be this functionality but I just hadn't found it yet.

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There is an application called terminal. Pops you straight to the command line. Apple-space bar brings up spotlight, and then type terminal and it will be the top app. Either that or got to the utilities folder in the applications directory. :)

Probably 98% of mac users don't know that the flash GUI is generally just running UNIX commands under the skin. There are lots of things you can customise under the hood if you can be bothered. You can get code from other UNIX variants and compile them for Mac, ssh and scp to other UNIX boxes etc etc. I can do everything at home that I can do at work on our Solaris MINI's. Can anyone see why I find it hard to understand the claims that they are incapable as computer? That's crazy talk.

Look, Apple may be rubbish as all the people that have never used one keep telling us but they seem to have a lot of people pretty happy. When I read this even I was shocked. Apple claim 91% of the over $1000US market in June.