I'm sure that I could have found somewhere to post this in an existing thread, but I thought it might be a good idea to keep it specific to those who've actually woirked on OS X and XP.

Let me preface this by saying that I am by no means what thalo would consider a "Pro User." I do not need my Mac for my livelihood, though I have dabbled (poorly, I might add) in graphics design.

I do consider myself somewhat proficient on the OS side, though. Perhaps the MIS and Computer Science schooling background whet my appetite to see what makes an OS tick. So I've intentionally broken and fixed Operating Systems since 7.5 as a demented hobby. In the process I’ve become the family and neighborhood Mac guru. Through my very own recommendation, more people than I can count have purchased Macs. There is a price though - I become their 24/7 tech support, though I hardly mind it, save the few 4 AM calls I've receive.

Needless to say, I take more interest in Macs, and specifically the Mac OS, than your typical word processing, internet surfing, Foo -Fighting- mp3 burning, freak. (Though I am a zany digi-kid in many respects as well).

Anyway, it goes without saying (to most in here) that I was a vocal X-Critic. Thought it was perhaps the tackiest, slowest, unfinished piece of beta-shit imaginable. Since it came from Apple Corp., it was shockingly disappointing and heart-breaking at the same time. I could not believe what was before me, like it was some kind of cruel joke.

A few updates later, and an iMac FP 800 Superdrive later, I was somewhat impressed. Fonts didn't look nearly as bad on the LCD as it did on the CRT. The boost in speed was a welcome surprise. I still was nowhere near the OS techie I was with 9 (and never will be, thanks to my lack of interest in becoming a UNIX geek) but it seemed to perform the job at hand with less pain than I had experienced on a machine that wasn't built with OS X in mind.

Perhaps the styling and once again, Ive's incredible influence, temporarily made me a happy camper.

Something was amiss as my experience with the FP was becoming less and pleasurable and the reality, that was temporarily clouded, began to resurface.

For instance, there is no excuse for the beachball to appear as I initially open my finder window after startup. Nor should it appear when opening my mail app, or when highlighting an app, or when highlighting a folder that holds many files. Opening Sys Prefs should not make me sit there with my thumb up my ass waiting for it to appear.

The fonts, which appeared crisper when compared to my CRT, where still atrocious as I began looking at them with a more discerning eye. Unacceptable.

Applications quit on a regular basis (NO it's NOT the user, for I keep a lean-mean, well-maintained system), and the browsers were oh-so-delicate and prone to crash. Internet speed? Ha! My broadband connection was not performing as it should in OS X. I'd log into 9 and surf and wow....a noticeable increase in speed.

I had been in the market for a new desktop (FP was fro my 11 yr old) and decided that I won't be taken for another cent by Mr. Jobs and Apple. I dabbled with XP in stores, and was willing to take the risk on a PC. Couldn't be worse than a Mac under OS X - no way, no how.

Bought a Dell. A 4550, 2.4 P4, 512 backside cache, 512 RAM (added more myself) 17" FP, yadda yadda, with Office XP installed, speakers, subwoofer, 3 year warranty......all for 4-500 dollars LESS than my FP iMac 800! (Tell me there's justice in Cupertino).

Simply put, in digi-kid nomenclature, the Dell ROCKS! Bigtime.

XP Fonts. BOOTIFUL. Man, are they impressive. No fuzziness, no blur. I selected the "Clear Type" option (have I mentioned that XP gives you options galore?) and it would make thalo cum his pants. Fonts look incredible no matter the browser as well. I use IE and Mozilla.

The net. Damn. ALL pages render in a split second - and I'm talking ANY graphic intensive one's as well. IE and Mozilla are equally impressive, though I give the nod to Mozilla's features, including their built in pop-up stopper. I never knew just how fast my broadband connection was till I got this PC. Even OS 9 pales tremendously.

GUI. Logical and option-filled. You make this sucker your very own, a la OS 9. Any way you want it, it becomes yours. Don't want memory-hogging eye candy? Shut em off, one by one. Even with ALL the eye candy enabled it screams. It's crisp. As crisp as our beloved OS 9. Without the eye candy it's just too beautiful an experience to describe. CHOICE. That's what XP affords its users. I consider that choice Microsoft's way of saying, "Hey, I respect you, and don't want to force anything down your throat."

Stability. Oh wow. Mac OS X rarely crashes, and kernel panics are far and few in between. Only the apps crash! (regularly I might add). Folks, I don't distinguish and OS crash and an OS crash due to applications, especially when that OS isn't the friendliest one to develop apps for. So yes, I consider all my apps crashing in OS X and an operating system error.

XP? Not ONE crash in 4 months. Nada. No apps have crashed. Not a one. Only app that ever quit was IE, and that's because I was doing funky things in Yahoo mail.

I can go on and on, and will elaborate as we go along. Just know this. My daughter played around on my Dell and “persuaded” me to buy her one as well. She actually said, "I don't like the Mac anymore, it's too slow." Daddy caved in and bought her one.

Now, the Mac sits there sadly neglected. I do futz around with it to see if I'll ever go back to OS X, and to see if I miss it. I don't. Now, when I go from the Dell to OS X, I actually feel like I'm in slow-motion doing the most simplest of tasks. From startup to shutdown it ALL sucks. I can barely deal with the fonts now in OS X. It's one big blur, as if my eyesight is faltering.

So, I will use the FP as an expensive toy. For iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, etc. Those are the only things I can actually say it excels in.

I want this to all change...and fast. I'm still a Mac man at heart, and I feel as if I'm cheating on my lady. (LOL……… please NO comments on that last one)

[This message was edited by SnobbyRobby on Mon May 26 2003 at 11:48 PM.]

I actually prefer the dresses that zip up the back. Yeah, they're a pain but…oh…I'll just skip that for now.

You make this sucker your very own, a la OS 9.

I think you've hit on something very true there, SR. I've certainly done that in many, many ways. I tried to do the same thing to OS X. I never hit that sweet spot.

And let's not underrate the crispness of fonts (and you clearly didn't). That's such a HUGE thing in my book. I mean, reading stuff on a computer screen is pretty basic, wouldn't you say? Would you buy a snazzy new car that was supposedly the best of the best but had a sharpened iron spike sticking up from the driver's seat? (Well, maybe some of you cross-dressers would.)

Good report, SR. I know I've talked to you before about some of this and told you some of what I thought. As I see it, XP is a hell of a lot closer to being the next generation of OS 9 than OS X is.

Without making this sound like an apology to the Mac diehards, this is my way of expressing that OS X, in its present state, cannot compete with XP. I put my money where my mouth is. It's my personal challenge to Apple to change all that so that my next purchase will be a shiny new G5.

"As I see it, XP is a hell of a lot closer to being the next generation of OS 9 than OS X is.

That sums it up Brad, only I struggle to keep it concise, hence my ramblings.

XP IS what OS 9 would have been if Apple stayed on the right path. I repeat the old MFI mantra: OS X is NOT a Mac. Period.

Just wondering if it were feasible for brother thalo to switch, if he'd share our sentiments.

Hello? are you there, thalo?

Hey, did I mention that here we are an upgrade and countless updates later, at 10.2.6, and that this piece of crap OS still struggles making preferences stick??? Can anyone think of anything more annoying than an OS being obstinate; defying what YOU, as the owner, want and expect it to do? Having it's own mind while flipping you the bird?

I can almost see Jobs laugh in our faces, as he allows these unacceptable problems to perpetuate. Blows my mind. Blame the circle-jerking X-men for this as they continue to heap praise for their Master.

I'm sure that somewhere within OS X there's a well hidden egg of Victoria saying, "Suckers!"

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I consider that choice Microsoft's way of saying, "Hey, I respect you, and don't want to force anything down your throat."

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Yeah, that's what they say to all the girls...

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That sums it up Brad, only I struggle to keep it concise, hence my ramblings.

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Struggle to keep it concise? On thalo.net? That's damn near a banning offense. Consider yourself warned.

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Hello? are you there, thalo?

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I think, quite literally, the Master Baiter is taking a couple days to bait a few hooks.

Hey guys,
No, I'm still here. Baiting the hook happens later in the week. (Not bait, though, fly-candy. The art of using visual stimuli to fool trout into thinking my little creations are food.) Just trying to get some work done. But I's here. I've been reading all the posts with joy.

I have been using XP, in (birdflip) VPC... and I have one old beater PC laptop where I use Windows 98. I hate the eye candy of XP, but once I turn it off, it's quite usable; for a PC that is.

Nope, sorry, I will never switch. OK, maybe if I hit the friggin' LOTTERY, and then just for laughs. I'm true blue Apple, through and through. But there's more to it than my loyalty and my totally irrational hope that Jobs will see the light again. My whole infrastructure is Mac, and all my software licenses (multiple) are for Mac versions. Reverse-switching for me is kind of somewhere I can't even THINK of going, because the money I'd have to spend re-licensing everything in PC versions would be out of control. Then there's all kinds of other hardware and driver issues.

I have Quark licensed for one PC, and I can work reasonably well in it there; not as well as in a Mac running 9, but I could survive if I had to. I own a few other scatterd PC apps, but not any other real big 'uns. Not much Adobe or Macromedia.

Before I'll turn entirely PC, I'd probably decide to nursemaid OS 9. And from virtually every other pro I know personally, that's where we are at this very minute in the industry. Adopting is not gonna happen in any big way, until the operating system is better.

Snobby, my brother, loved your long post... yeah that ClearType is killing me how good it is. Let me get this straight, MICRO-freakin'-SOFT has better font rendering than the MAC??? To me, that's one of the sure signs of the apocalypse. But damn if it ain't true. Graphic designers, sorry, can't live without decent font rendering. Anyone who says OS X is adequate for design, is overlooking not only speed and performance issues, but font rendering and spacing issues. So I have pretty much no choice but to say that designers who say they have adopted gleefully, and good riddance to 9, are probably bangers.

The only real work I'm having any luck with in OS X is the real unixy stuff. Behind the scenes web work, telnetting to this or that server, tweaking Perl scripts from the terminal, setting permissions. So yeah, the geek monkey work is going fine, I must say. It's when I have to do the creative work, that I end up always booting back into the legacy. Sometimes I try to suck it up and take the beachballing, but usually it's for small tasks. Postcard? OK, maybe I'll stay in X. Bus-wrap? Big Flash site? Significant file management activities in the Finder? Bye bye. Anything big, anything I know OS X will wig out over, I don't even bother trying. I have a Quickey I use to just send me back to the sanity of 9. I hit it, pour coffee, and wait for the reboot process to complete.

It is a DRAG to have to have two Macs. I want to be able to go seamlessly from one task to the next, without having to endure a boot. But I've weighed the wasted time over actually trying to work in OS X, and it's the lesser of two evils.

I have no idea why I keep trying to prematurely eject you into your little vacation. It's not like we have plans to just totally trash the place while you're gone. We do, but that's beside the point.

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It's not like we have plans to just totally trash the place while you're gone. We do, but that's beside the point.

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Great image! The dogs trashing the junkyard while the junk man's off shooting craps...

WHO LET THE DOGS IN?

Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.

WHO LET THE DOGS IN?

Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.
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Junkyard dogs work for free, they're cheap to feed, they can entertain themselves with nothing but their own tongues, and they can sniff out crap or bitches at close or long range.

Who knows? Some of 'em may even BE bitches...although I suppose you're using the term non-genderally.

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Originally posted by 9point5man:
Who knows? Some of 'em may even BE bitches...although I suppose you're using the term non-genderally.

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Whether the teats are vestigal or not is immaterial. You can tell a bitch by how savagely and humorlessly they go for one when it is proffered

WHO LET THE DOGS IN?

I don’t resent at all being referred to as a dog. If I could do the one thing that dogs do so well I might not leave the house.

[[!# #l10n key="XSL_QUOTE" def="QUOTE"##]]Originally posted by SnobbyRobby:
"As I see it, XP is a hell of a lot closer to being the next generation of OS 9 than OS X is.

That sums it up Brad, only I struggle to keep it concise, hence my ramblings.

XP _IS_ what OS 9 would have been if Apple stayed on the right path. I repeat the old MFI mantra: OS X is NOT a Mac. Period.[/QUOTE]

Hey, kid. Nice to see you!

lloyd

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I am an OS 9 user

"Hey, kid. Nice to see you!"

Hey, Lloyd! Likewise!