Thread: From Mac to PC
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Koodari
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
 
2004-10-04, 17:11

In my opinion, you'd be best off if you kept the Mac for everything *besides* gaming. You can still extract some amount of cash from it by switching the 9800Pro to a weaker card, you can use a cheap DVD-ROM drive for the PC because the Mac already has a DVD burner, and you can backup your stuff between the machines. Having the two machines is even more important if you are a tinkerer type, so that your organizing/messaging software will run smoothly even when you are in the middle of a three day overclocking grind or hardware troubleshoot.

I'm pretty platform agnostic myself, I mostly use software that runs on all major platforms or is easily replaced with another piece of software. Still, if I had a choice such as yours, I would never pick Windows for a "production" platform. I simply can't trust it with the organizing/messaging functions that are important for my life. Bad security, bad availability, bad reliability. If (when) it ever breaks down, is hacked or seriously infected, it means at least a day of installing OS, antivirus, firewall, upgrades, software and *settings* before the box is even close to normal. It's amazing how slow and inconvenient the average Windows installs are, not least for the reboots (IIRC Visual Studio took three reboots in a normal install that went as it was supposed to). With most native Windows programs you can forget about reasonably backing up program preferences, so you'll usually set those up by hand. None of that is fun, it's all just boring mechanical work, and if you consider your time to have any value, Windows is not a good choice. This was just the OS and programs, things become worse if you have to worry about the backup and retrieval of data.

I'm getting a gaming Windows PC myself at some point, but no way my productive desktop or server use will ever happen on it. Those jobs are for the Powerbook and the yet-to-be-configured old FreeBSD PC.
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