i agree with alan davies

I was going to use actual words as a rebuttal, but I assume that jambalaya is joking, so not really worth the effort.

Sounds unlucky to me. We’ve been running a £300 bargain bucket PC for about 5 years and not had a single problem with it. Never crashes, runs decent (I use it for Photoshop all the time), updates generally take no longer than a minute or two.

Depends what you are using it for I guess. Your £300 budget PC is not going to have the grunt to edit raw HD video in realtime or anytime for that matter! In my experience PCs that can handle that kind of task tend to be unreliable, whereas Macs tend to work hard more reliably. I’ve had plenty of experience on both platforms in parallel and Mac wins in my book, although it is getting closer with Windows playing catchup with OSX.

I don’t expect my cheapo PC to be like my MacBook Pro. but it is dreadful – as I said in the OP, painful waits for updates has been a killer.

Please Apple – bring out a high capacity laptop…

FFS – I’ve just switched it off and there’s now more updates before it will shut down!!!!

Jesus, is this still going on in the modern world?

Honestly, macs are shit, windows are shit. Who cares? It’s like saying your Ford Focus is ace while that person’s Volkswagon Golf is rubbish.Nonsense beyond believe.

Honestly guys, it was funny when it was emacs versus vi (vi won, obviously), but this continued ‘this marginally different OS is better than the other OS’ is absolutely crazy.

johndoh – Member
Nothing to do with stable OSs, it’s the amount of interference from the supplier – my Mac is fine, so many times I try to use the PC I get massive hold ups due to updates.

you must be doing something odd coz windows 7 here and i never have any probs and my machine is full of crap, gets a bit laggy editing video stuff, but it only cost a couple of hundred quid!

Struggling to understand what on earth it is that you are doing OP. It appears that you have bought a low spec laptop that is running an old install of Windows. Presumably during the last part of the setup (the personalisation bit) you said “yes, get any updates”. And that’s what it is doing. However, because the install is quite old there are a number of updates it needs to do and some updates will require previous updates before they can install. So that is probably why it is going round in circles a bit. And being an HP retail machine it probably also comes with a bunch of crapware installed on it. That will be HP (or the shop you bought it from). Not Microsoft. Plus, if the machine was built with Windows 8 one of the downloads will probably be your free upgrade to Windows 8.1

Once it has been updated the only things it will check for each day are the virus / malware updates. After that, updates are typically only released once per month.

I have been running Windows 8 and 8.1 for quite a long time now and, while there is the occasional glitch (and this is generally down to a driver being a little less than perfect) it is pretty stable and reliable.

I’m sitting here on a laptop running Vista (!!!!) and the OS is pretty much invisible, you could say that it just works.

Which is more than I can say for the fruit based product we have in this house.

Jesus, is this still going on in the modern world?

Well, not the modern world, where smart arses like me and allthepies use chromebooks 🙂

This one goes out to all my lovely Jamies.

yep windows 7, upgraded PC for peanuts, able to edit raw HD video, running complex 3d simulations, lots of random stuff going on, running a DB server in there too all under windows, crash? can’t remember when, updates infrequently if you let then=m run monthly you won’t really notice them. Stable, cost effective and just works.

I’ve switched to Mac recently and whilst it’s good, there are a number of things I miss or that are just annoying:

– The dock window left/dock right on W7 and above is great. I’m surprised Mac OS hasn’t copied that
– Keyboard shortcuts seem much more logical in Windows. I find pinky on CTRL and index on C far quicker and more ergonomic that any combination of CMD and C on a mac.
– I’m struggling to get used to the Mac definition of minimise too. If you minimise something to the dock it stays there, minimised, until you click the and open it again. Personally I prefer being able to minimise something temporarily in Windows and then quickly be able to ALT-TAB to bring it open again
– Similarly I haven’t come across a good way of minimising all windows in one go (ie. a Windows M equivalent).
– I think most of my other grievances are Safari specific, which is why I’m moving away from it now. eg. If you click a link to another page then go back it’ll refresh the page and take you to the very top again; not the position you were just reading like most browsers. Also if (on sites like Wikipedia) you open an image full screen. Standard practice is to press escape to return to the page, but Safari then removes itself from full screen view too.

– The dock window left/dock right on W7 and above is great. I’m surprised Mac OS hasn’t copied that

Don’t be surprised. Sometimes, I think Apple wilfully leaves out features people ask for.

Anyway. Use BetterTouchTool to enable window snapping (left/right/up/down etc). That’s about 1% of what the app does, tho. Amazing for being productive.

http://www.boastr.net/

– Keyboard shortcuts seem much more logical in Windows. I find pinky on CTRL and index on C far quicker and more ergonomic that any combination of CMD and C on a mac.

That’ll come with time.

– I’m struggling to get used to the Mac definition of minimise too. If you minimise something to the dock it stays there, minimised, until you click the and open it again. Personally I prefer being able to minimise something temporarily in Windows and then quickly be able to ALT-TAB to bring it open again

Try hiding apps, instead. CMD+H, then will unhide when you CMD+Tab back to them.

– Similarly I haven’t come across a good way of minimising all windows in one go (ie. a Windows M equivalent).

Does that just show desktop? If so that’s CMD+F3

Good info on shortcuts here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343

– I think most of my other grievances are Safari specific, which is why I’m moving away from it now. eg. If you click a link to another page then go back it’ll refresh the page and take you to the very top again; not the position you were just reading like most browsers. Also if (on sites like Wikipedia) you open an image full screen. Standard practice is to press escape to return to the page, but Safari then removes itself from full screen view too.

….that’s why I use Chrome. I want to use Safari, for cloud tabs and the cool stuff it can do/sync to Safari on my iPhone. But there’s just too many minor annoyances, where I always end up switching back to Chrome. Maybe Yosemite will improve things*

*It probably wont.

This one goes out to all my lovely Jamies.

Ah, I remember that gif well…. :P

been fixing both PC and Macs for the last 16 years… macs are better. I have and use both.

painful waits for updates has been a killer.

It will settle down once it’s brought up to date.

Re Macs, the reason they are expensive is that Apple tightly control everything that goes into them and this costs time and money. It’s a closed system which limits cheap third party stuff. That’s why Windows stuff can be cheaper, I think.

Re Macs, the reason they are expensive is that Apple tightly control everything that goes into them and this costs time and money. It’s a closed system which limits cheap third party stuff. That’s why Windows stuff can be cheaper, I think.

Nah. It’s mostly materials, R&D and prestige tax.

I’ve not tried WIndows 8 yet, but 7 seems to be running ok for me but even tho it works, it’s what I think of a necessary evil, as quite a bit of hardware and software need Windows to run.

Nah. It’s mostly materials, R&D and prestige tax

Nah, they charge what people are willing to pay, like any ‘designer’ stuff.

That’ll be the prestige tax.

Saying that, when I bought my Macbook Air back in 2012, it was one of the cheaper options out of the several ‘ultrabooks’ I was considering. The others being from Samsung/Sony and Acer.

The others may had had slightly better specs, but Macbook Air, like all other Apple laptops, had the better keyboard/chassis by a country mile.

…and to be honest, have done for the last 10 years.

Built up a new pc over the summer about £500. Hybrid drive, decent amount of ram and updates turned to manual (check monthly) and its awsome. Boots in less than a minute and has been stable.
Granted its a clean install and i remove unwanted programs and gubbins with “everything”.
Ironicly to this thread it was trying to uninstall itunes from a pc that led to finding how to truely uninstall a program.

Does that just show desktop? If so that’s CMD+F3

Or set a hot corner up in Preferences. I can exposed my desktop by moving the cursor into the bottom left corner of the screen. You could also use different desktops for different tasks, then it’s just a matter of swiping the trackpad – no ‘annoying’ key-pressing at all.

Heh…hot corners seems to be one of those things Apple implemented and then forgot about. I still use it to show Dashboard….for the 1 measly widget, another Apple graveyard, I use.

Anyway, option for setting hot corners is as per 3Fish:

Preferences > Mission Control>

I would continue to stress the awesomeness of BetterTouchTool, tho, as you could map the show desktop command to literally any hot key or gesture you want.

Problem with this is that you aren’t comparing apples with apples (pun intended). Macs are an integral unit whereas windows is just an OS. Comparing a high end Mac with a bargain bucket laptop from a lazy corporate just isn’t a level playing field. I’m not a massive windows fan but since W7 my work station has run flawlessly and it gets pushed hard. I still use linux at home though just for a change of scenery.

Always gets me, as a Windows user, that if people spent as much on a PC as they do on a MAC then the experience would be somewhat different.

Saying that, when I bought my Macbook Air back in 2012, it was one of the cheaper options out of the several ‘ultrabooks’ I was considering. The others being from Samsung/Sony and Acer.

The others may had had slightly better specs, but Macbook Air, like all other Apple laptops, had the better keyboard/chassis by a country mile.

Agreed, which is why I don’t get the misleading comments about “3 times the cost of a PC”. If you want something to compare, then buy something comparable.

Edit : As the Dutch writes above, too.

Comparing a high end Mac with a bargain bucket laptop from a lazy corporate just isn’t a level playing field.

Except that they don’t make bargain Macs. This is the biggest differentiator. If you were weighing up Ford vs Lexus you’d certainly consider price and value.

I have one of each and the Mac is by far the better piece of equipment, and i mean that pound for pound. I think Mac haters just can’t afford one the same way I have no interest in a high performance car as I can’t afford one of them (spent all my money on a mac and a carbon bike)

johndoh, does your problem Windows box have an antivirus? Not used it recently, but Norton used to slow my machine down to that degree, downloading it’s own updates and slowing the others.

I’m using W7 and recently W10 tester thingy

They’re both solid (so far, for the W10 a week in) and neither updates for more than a couple of minutes on shutdown

We have an old box in the lounge that gets fired up every few months. It tends to cycle a couple of times as somebody descrived above, but 10 minutes would EASILY see it done (W7)

I’m blaming HP / still possibly malware
(or else maybe you’ve removed something that’s important)

——————————

and surely you can fit bigger drives into macs, can’t you ??

Macbook Air, like all other Apple laptops, had the better keyboard/chassis by a country mile.

…and to be honest, have done for the last 10 years.

Have you tried a Lenovo? Incredibly good keyboard on my 11″ one (if only the video hadn’t died on it 🙁 )

Have you tried a Lenovo?

Looked at them at the time, but the model I was after wasn’t available for several months….possibly.

That’s the other benefit I found at the time. Apple announced the Macbook Air, and I could order the next day. Asus were supposed to be releasing a new Zenbook which looked pretty sweet. Could I find any information about release dates? Could I bovril. Shops didn’t know, Asus UK didn’t know…well, they never got back to me. The PC market’s fragmentation is more of a weakness than a strength IMHO.

In relation to the first few posts, I upgraded to windows 8.1, fine for the first month or 2, after that my actual windows programs became really slow and barely did anything, couldn’t even get on control panel to restore it etc, left it for a while loading and managed to return to windows 8, much, much better, only thing is if you do that you have to reinstall some programmes but don’t lose your files so back up any programmes you want/ need.

Just bought a microsoft surface pro 3 , its flippin awesome. Does the tablet thing when all you want to do is surf the web in front of the tv, and then when you want to do something more heavy duty it becomes a proper laptop and runs all your usual windows productivity software and lets you use a mouse and keyboard.

Great bit of kit.

I love these threads. They’re great magnets for nonsense.

For instance,

Having to support some 6000 Windows PC’s I can confirm that Windows is shit!
Memory hungry, update hungry and a sponge for viruses and trojans!

Memory hungry compared to what?

Update hungry? a) Windows Updates are released monthly, barring emergencies, and updates are a Good Thing, and b) if you’re managing 6000 PCs then you’re either running WSUS and have full control over updates or you’re a dolt.

a sponge for viruses and trojans!

I can’t remember the last time I saw a malware infection on a Windows PC that was down to flaws in the OS. The single biggest infection point by a country mile these days is unpatched third party software (Java and Flash being the biggest culprits) and the second, a long way behind (and outside of the corporate environment), is users running executables in phishing emails and torrents.

If you manage six thousand PCs and you’re dogged with update problems and virus outbreaks I’d respectfully suggest a career change.

As for the OP,

A new PC will have a lot of updates pending because it’s been sat in a box since the image was built. This is a one-off, it will drop to monthly updates once the initial round is complete as per my last post. If you don’t like it, you can change the settings to disable it. (Which is a bad idea, but you can do it if you want).

Cougar – Moderator
I love these threads. They’re great magnets for nonsense.

like this?

droppinneutron – Member
I have one of each and the Mac is by far the better piece of equipment, and i mean that pound for pound. I think Mac haters just can’t afford one the same way I have no interest in a high performance car as I can’t afford one of them (spent all my money on a mac and a carbon bike)

In all honesty I can get the same performance and do lots more, Mac OS is still a fairly niche/minority OS – about 6% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
so there is a lot of really useful software that is never going to have a Mac version. Most of the work machines I have used in the past probably cost the same as the Mac equivalent but nicely run all the software I want, don’t crash and can be upgraded relatively cheaply when required.

Windows is a lot more stable than android on my nexus 10, which freezes up regularly. Android is based on Linux…

Heh…people willing to fight to the death for their operating systems!

The PC market’s fragmentation is more of a weakness than a strength IMHO.

Don’t think so. It’s the reason people who can’t afford a grand can still have a PC. MS and the IBM licensing model helped bring the cost of tech down hugely, Imo.

MS and the IBM licensing model helped bring the cost of tech down hugely, Imo.

Hate to say it but I think Amstrad had some input here – IBM PCs were always really expensive and it was people like Dell and Gateway that started the commodity pricing, and then Amstrad really pushed the price (and quality) down.

I’ve got and use every day:

IPhone
Nokia lumix running Windows mobile

Macbook Pro
HP laptop running windows
Desktop PC running windows

Nexus 7 running android
Raspberry pi running raspbmc
Google chromecast

WD mybooklive NAS

The only thing out of all of that that I don’t like/think is shit, is the NAS. I can’t wait until all my stuff on it has finished uploading to Google drive so that I can put it in the microwave.

Always amazed when people write off windows/osx/android/Linux entirely