cant decide for the life of me

[otispunkmeyer]

that is the question

im looking into a new computer at the moment, along with being unable to decide whether i want an iMac or a laptop i also cant decide between which OS i should go for. hopefully deciding the OS should narrow the hard ware choices down for me.

bit of background info: been a windows user since forever, know most of the ins and outs and appreciate its flexibility, i have very limited OS X experience, gaming is not an issue, computer usage mainly revolves around internet, email, word processing, image and video editing, encoding music and video, watching video and music listening. pretty standard stuff.

i also require that my computer be able to run Solidedge, NX3/4 (uni graphics) AutoCad, MatLab and mindjet mind manager - most of these probably wont run under OSX.

so i was set on OS X, fancied a change, heard good things. then vista arrived and i began hearing good things about that also, seems it was more than just xp with a fancy suit. so now i cant decide whether to go OS X and bootcamp XP, or to just fore
go that little issue completely and stick with windows.

could i please ask then, if users of both OS's could chime in with their own Pro's and Con's to each. i would like to know what you use your computers for and maybe how your chosen OS in particular helps you with your work.

im off to pc world/comet/currys soon, to have a play. hopefully so i can get a better idea.

 

[Smilin]

Vista rocks.

 

[hellokeith]

I suppose you could get an Intel Mac and then dual boot with XP. I'm very wary of Mac hardware though. Very limited upgrade path, very expensive, and Mac hasn't had a very good record the last few years with hardware, especially laptops.

 

[Griswold]

I think the conclusion of ATs vista article was, there is little reason to flock over to OSX if you can get vista. Even moreso if you need to run apps that require you to dualboot into XP on a mactel. And for once, windows got something OSX doesnt have: superfetch/readyboost - which is a great feature and its also what makes vista a good deal faster than XP, given enough RAM.

 

[Tarrant64]

You do realize there is no need to "dual boot" with OS X. That's why they have Parallels. Vista runs just fine on a MacBook Pro with 2gb of Ram.

If you go Mac you can get the best of both worlds. If you go with a Windows PC there is no real way to decide you want OS X.

Just a thought.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

also i heard OS X 10.5 could literally be round the corner. end of march was thrown around as a date, though most of the people with the pre-release versions reckon it'll be june. the only feature i know about and the only one that could benefit me is that they are kind of including a parallels type affair in the OS so you can just double click windows programs and have OS X mimic Windows for you to run it.

superfetch is great. i tried a couple of laptops in some shops the other day, i was given free reign on some of the machines, so i installed things like Adobe photoshop elements etc (the icons were on the desktop, but when i DC'd them they began to install) and it worked nice. they all opened very qucikly, the machines were very snappy and responsive. media center was very slick also, but then so was apples implementation.

flip 3D is absolutely gimmicky as hell, its such a waste of a powerful GUI

windows side bar wasnt so bad, but it rather pales in comparison to OS X's dashboard feature, it really does.

i was settled on a MBP, but i have heard a good few complaints, all aluminium chassis getting warm becuause it acts like a big heatsink, build quality issues, 3rd party RAM issues etc. the imac dont seem to have those troubles. but i cant get away from the fact that the MBP's look astoundingly good. hopefully ill get some more vista time this weekend when i go laptop hunting again