Oh god I hate PCs - I'd forgotten how much

Danny1969

I've got no particular loyalty to either Mac or PC, cept maybe an admiration for some of the design flair in the Macbook Pro and iMac metalwork. I have 2 iMac's and a Macbook Pro but also a Dell Latitude, an HP G series, Dell Optiplex and a clone PC. All used for different things. PC's aren't politics, you can play both sides  

It is a bad time for PC's though .... there just isn't the money to make a PC properly anymore without scrimping on something. Apple can make money because people will pay extra for the name but margins on your average clone are horrific, hardly worth it and in fact these days not worth it when someone like Spire will build it, load it and soak test it for £40 on top of the parts which are cheaper than an end user can buy anyway. 

crunchman

Danny1969 said:

I've got no particular loyalty to either Mac or PC, cept maybe an admiration for some of the design flair in the Macbook Pro and iMac metalwork. I have 2 iMac's and a Macbook Pro but also a Dell Latitude, an HP G series, Dell Optiplex and a clone PC. All used for different things. PC's aren't politics, you can play both sides  

It is a bad time for PC's though .... there just isn't the money to make a PC properly anymore without scrimping on something. Apple can make money because people will pay extra for the name but margins on your average clone are horrific, hardly worth it and in fact these days not worth it when someone like Spire will build it, load it and soak test it for £40 on top of the parts which are cheaper than an end user can buy anyway. 

True.  I bought my last PC £50 cheaper than I could have built it.

Having said that, I did buy it OS free, add an SSD for the OS, and just use the original HDD for storage.

Snags

RaymondLin said:

Snags said:

How much did your dead 4 year old laptop cost compared to the Mac Pro?

Not necessarily the case here, but I've had soooo many conversations which essentially boiled down to "My £2,000 brand new MacBook Pro is just so much better than my five year old unmaintained cheap crap £300 laptop it's untrue. PC's are crap"

I hear more of the opposite.

People tell me "my PC is so much cheaper than your Mac and it is faster too, I just upgraded my graphic card and RAM etc etc"

But they don't tell you they spend hundreds to keep their PC up to date every year/other year, they spend ages keeping it in tip top running conditions, they know what they are doing.

Me, I spend £2k in 2012 for an iMac and spent 0 minutes doing any maintenance and £0 buying parts and use it like an appliance.  I am not IT support.  The computer should work for me, I shouldn't be working for it.

In the same 7-8 years I spent nothing and no time keeping my Mac running, never even reformatted, how much have they spent, how long have they spent on the PC is on a different planet.  I'd bet a lot more than 0 minutes and £0.

I should probably point out that I hate all of the bastards with a fairly equal passion: Windows, Apple, Linux. There's no favouritism here.

mudslide73

I'm not keen on Macs but that's because I'm a PC guy. They must be ok though because people keep buying them.

crunchman

mudslide73 said:

I'm not keen on Macs but that's because I'm a PC guy. They must be ok though because people keep buying them.

People keep buying cigarettes.

One people are in the Apple ecosystem, it's not easy to get out.

Go back 15 or 20 years, there is no doubt that they were better for some things than PCs.  Just when PCs were catching up for Music, Apple bought Logic, and discontinued the PC version.   Logic users are forced into buying more Macs (or Hackintoshes).  They have you by the short and curlies.

prowla

crunchman said:

mudslide73 said:

I'm not keen on Macs but that's because I'm a PC guy. They must be ok though because people keep buying them.

People keep buying cigarettes.

One people are in the Apple ecosystem, it's not easy to get out.

Go back 15 or 20 years, there is no doubt that they were better for some things than PCs.  Just when PCs were catching up for Music, Apple bought Logic, and discontinued the PC version.   Logic users are forced into buying more Macs (or Hackintoshes).  They have you by the short and curlies.

You buy the computer for the application - that's one approach. So if you want an Apple application, then you need a Mac to run it on.

Same with Windows applications - you want Powerpoint, Visio, whatever, you need a Windows system to run it on.

My approach of using VMs wherever possible detaches me from dependency upon the host computer.

Me, I won't buy a machine where you can't upgrade the RAM, so Apple don't have a product to sell me.

Nitefly

A question, if I may: how does one do a clean install of the OS when they don't give you the media when you buy a pc/laptop?

darthed1981

Nitefly said:

A question, if I may: how does one do a clean install of the OS when they don't give you the media when you buy a pc/laptop?

With windows 10 you just use the "media creation tool" from microsoft to make a usb stick to boot from, its very straightforward.

TimmyO

Nitefly said:

A question, if I may: how does one do a clean install of the OS when they don't give you the media when you buy a pc/laptop?

Sometimes the drive will have a recovery partition to do it from, this PC had that but it didn't work, but it also came with a USB recovery stick which did 

Danny1969

darthed1981 said:

Nitefly said:

A question, if I may: how does one do a clean install of the OS when they don't give you the media when you buy a pc/laptop?

With windows 10 you just use the "media creation tool" from microsoft to make a usb stick to boot from, its very straightforward.

On a lot of PC's though you will need to enter the BIOS, turn off secure boot, enable legacy boot etc. It's more of a pain in the arse then it used to be. It's also a good idea to make sure you have a driver on a USB stick or disk for the wifi \ nic adapter before you wipe and reload because  if Win 10 doesn't recognise the adapter on install you will Win 10 installed BUT a bunch of stuff without drivers ... meaning you then need to use another machine to get said drivers. 

Win 10 at the mo is still accepting Win 7 product keys so it's a free OS for people still running 7 who have a 7 COA on the side of the machine or in a drawer. If you have neither just buy a Satellite C660 base plastic or similar with a COA stuck to it for £15 or so and tell the seller just to message you the code and bin the plastic.  

I have to say, Internet recovery on a Mac is a wonderful thing. Install new blank harddrive ... turn on - CMD-Option-R  connect to your Wifi and boom ... download the OS from Apples server. No recovery or media creator needed. 
Try that on a PC and your be waiting a very long time for something to happen

randella

I use ‘em both, they’re tools. Win 10 and Mac OS Axolotl, whatever it’s called. Both drag and niggle as much as each other, I.e. not very much. 

Currently shifting very slowly over to Linux for one reason or another, I’m sure I’ll find some minor problem with it. 

I think they’re all pretty good. I remember installing drivers for a Chinese clone dot matrix printer in MS DOS 6, with no instructions. At 1am. 

Folk don’t know they’re born

Philtre

randella said:

I remember installing drivers for a Chinese clone dot matrix printer in MS DOS 6, with no instructions. At 1am. 

Folk don’t know they’re born

Born? Born? When I were a lad we used DR-DOS and had to manually edit the config,sys file to squeeze last ounce of memory out. The youth of today...pah!

Danny1969

You had DOS !!! we dreamed of having DOS

beed84

crunchman said:

mudslide73 said:

I'm not keen on Macs but that's because I'm a PC guy. They must be ok though because people keep buying them.

People keep buying cigarettes.

One people are in the Apple ecosystem, it's not easy to get out.

This is quite probably true; once you're in, that's it. However, using the addiction of cigarettes makes it sound like a bad habit. I personally don't see it that way, and from my experience with both parties I find the use of such a system much less stressful than the PC/Windows route.

earwighoney

Danny1969 said:

I have to say, Internet recovery on a Mac is a wonderful thing. Install new blank harddrive ... turn on - CMD-Option-R  connect to your Wifi and boom ... download the OS from Apples server. No recovery or media creator needed. 

Unless the OS itself is corrupted!  I was trying to install High Sierra on my MBP and the installer from the Apple Server was corrupted.  I had to find an alternative source and create a bootable installer. 

It's a problem that exists for users trying to update from certain older versions of Mac OSX.  If I had a newer version of OSX and updated to High Sierra the problem wouldn't exist but the Mac Store wouldn't allow my machine to update to an intermediate version. 

scrumhalf

DOS 6? That had a proper editor didn't it? No EDLIN horrors where things had to be typed so carefully.

Philtre

scrumhalf said:

DOS 6? That had a proper editor didn't it? No EDLIN horrors where things had to be typed so carefully.

I used XTree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree

Wolfetone

Have built and used PC's since 1993 with no issues that couldn't be easily sorted. PC's are great for learning the hardware side of things.

Can't really understand the problem tbh. 

Kittyfrisk

Wolfetone said:

Have built and used PC's since 1993 with no issues that couldn't be easily sorted. PC's are great for learning the hardware side of things.

Can't really understand the problem tbh. 

Yes, they're fine & I for one am not dissing them.
 On the other hand, when you are trying to set up a group of 50 + PC's from the same manufacturer and then finding that they weren't constructed from the same components, from the same hardware manufacturers and you can't find a set of common drivers... not so much fun as a single DIY build.
 But hey it's OK, as the boss says 'what's the problem, they're all the same thing aren't they...'  

roberty

Kittyfrisk said:

^  @guitartango   And when doing a Comp.Studies course, I wrote a BASIC random number generator programme that then did 3 different sort routines (insertion, selection & bubble) before printing out the results.
My Atari 1040STE did it so fast that I thought I'd written it wrong. I had to increase the numbers generated by a factor of 100 just to show it was actually working and it still took under a minute.
386 PC that we were using on the course ( OK for the time, 1980's), took 20 odd minutes using the exact same code.
I had to bring my Atari in, along with a friends Amiga, to prove to the lecturer that it was true 

 That would have been the interpreter/compiler. GWBASIC and particularly QBASIC were pretty high level and interpreted. I'm guessing it was pretty much native on the Atari.