Help me buy a computer

[owl]

Suppose elerrina_amanya and I were buying a laptop or whatever they're called these days.

[Poll #1047204]


Apparently it is possible to get student discount on a Mac. I was going to say I needed more info on Macs, but I suppose a new Windows machine would have Vista, of which I have heard little and none good. When Microsoft came up with an OS that mostly works, why can't they just stick with it?

Comments

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

Vista's a real pain in the neck right now but it'll probably get better over the next six months as Microsoft patch it (AKA finish the bloody thing). Saying that, it irritated me enough that I fled to Linux in utter despair after Media Player crashed the entire system so hard that I couldn't even access task manager for the umpteenth time. So I'm probably not an unbiased source given that I seemed to run into every compatibility bug going for the six weeks or so I used it. The latest thing about a 90% drop in network performance when playing media files really is the cherry on the top. I did notice some abominable connection speed issues but I attributed them to my using Virgin Media, which is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot at the best of times.

I've never used a Mac but I've heard good things about them. MacOS is a UNIX environment these days which gives them an automatic leg-up over Windows in my eyes (UNIX is cryptic but logical and doesn't have that thrice-damned system registry to muck things up) and the GUI's apparently pretty nice too. Problem is application compatibility. It'll probably be a real faff-on if you want the latest and greatest MS Office or whatever and just forget about games unless you want to dual boot (which is pretty easy to set up apparently, so not too bad if you don't mind shelling out for an XP license). If you're happy enough to get by with things like Open Office (which actually works quite well these days unless you're doing something really flashy with spreadsheets or suchlike) then you'd probably be fine. The loss of IE is hardly something to grieve either but there are some websites still that barf if you try to use another browser (some programmers are just lazy twits). You can get all the GNU tools too, I think, which is great if you're going to do stuff like programming or whatever. Emacs for the win.

There'll be a bit of a learning curve with the Mac, though. Like I said, never used one myself, but apparently it doesn't bother to try and imitate Windows for newbies like Linux distributions generally do. If you haven't used one before, it'll probably take a while to get used to it before you can use it as easy as you do Windows now. For a start, all the keyboard shortcuts are different from what I hear and the menu bars work a little differently (they anchor to the top of the screen rather than the top of the application window - like on the Amiga).

And just in case you were suffering from a bout of temporary insanity after reading this and were considering asking: No. Do not get Linux, not unless you're a computer geek (like me) and have the patience to faff on getting drivers and stuff working. There's always something that doesn't work quite right with Linux, even with the nice user-friendly modern versions, and it's rarely a point and click thing to fix in my experience. The end result is a fairly nice system if you like that sort of thing but the process of getting there can be double-plus unfun. I suppose if you bought a system with Linux in mind it would work better but that'd take better planning than my usual approach to life.

[/geek]

[owl]

I'm not bothered about the learning curve much, as I've used different OS before—I used Linux at uni—the professor went 'Sorry you've got to spend a week of your project time learning how to use it, here's the reference, but Windows is a resource-hog and we need to do squillions of calculations a second'—it took me about two days to get used to it actually—and my first school computer was a Mac, although that was a decade and *cough* change ago. Actually I lie, the very first was known as 'the BBC computer' and had a keyboard about 4 inches thick and floppies that were actually floppy and had a hole in the middle and wiped themselves if left to close to things with a magnetic field like, oh, monitors.

It would be the applications that would make me hesitate. I'd be pleased enough to ditch IE forever (I use Firefox all the time and I've never had real problems with any website), and I don't do games beyond a bit of Sudoku. However, it would be annoying to want some program and find that it only was for windows. Like Semagic for instance, sigh.

Don't worry, I wasn't planning on Linux. I like it, but I like even more having a sysadmin to yell to when things don't work the way they ought.