New Computer

Ten years may be pushing it - but I've been using Macs for 16 years, and I'm only on my third, which has years of life left in it. My previous machine lasted 7 1/2 years and I replaced it because it wasn't up to running MacOS X - and I couldn't get updated versions of Mozilla for MacOS 9.

I am a PC guy and I know lots of PC users and lots of Mac ussers. I do not understand the idea that Macs "are so much better and easier to use than PC's". They both have their pluses and minuses. Both systems still are not geared to the novice.On PC life. I have had 3 PCs since 1992. A 486sx 25, white box, bought through computer shopper. As time went on I added new sound cards, memory, HD's and video boards. Lasted me probably 5-6 years. Then I built a Pentium 2 machine. This I also upgraded through the years. Currently I have a Pentium 4 Dell machine. This also I have upgraded. None of my upgrades on any of the machines were because something died. I just put in a new ATI videocard yesterday(cost of card $95.) I will never buy a Dell again because it is not made to easily make changes.(memory slots are not very accessible, some card slots blocked, HD positioning is just plain whacked)I have never had a MB give me issues. My wife has had 3 laptops in the 7 years have known her. The first, an HP, had the electric cord connection break. Since it was 4 years old and would cost $250 to fix we bought an inexpensive Acer. That worked great till I stepped on it and cracked the screen. Now she has a Gateway with AMD64 and Vista64. I am using it now and love it. I have no issues at all. It cost less than $500.I do not think that the Mac is an inherently better or worse machine than a PC. I like the variety and flexibility of a PC.

When one of my PC's lasts more than five years it will be my first, although it could happen soon. I think my current PC is around four years old, a top-of-the-line Dell XPS desktop.Of course, what people consider "still functioning" may vary. It does everything that's essential, but the microphone input and the DVD-RW drive have died, and it no longer automatically reboots after a power failure.--Percy

I've had PCs last for an absurdly long amount of time.This silly meme that "Macs are more reliable" is 10% truth and 90% horseshit.Macs are made from the same components PCs are. They use the same processors, teh same hard drives, the same motherboards, the same RAM, the same video cards, the same optical drives, etc.Their components are no more or less reliable than PC components. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant or a liar.The OS is a somewhat different story - and at this point, other than the "nifty" but usually mostly irrelevant design features Apple adds to Macs, its the only distinguishing feature between a Mac and a PC.The Mac OS is not inherently more secure than Windows or Linus; it'ssimply a smaller target. When making malware, whether that be a virus or simple spyware, the goal is to affect as many systems as possible. Since vulnerabilities are specific to an operating system, writing malware for the OS with the largest market share is the obvious choice. The commercial (and pirate) success of Windows has basically painted a giant bullseye on it's virtual ass.Why write software to infect less than 10% of all PCs when you can write software to infect greater than 80%?Really it comes down to matters of compatibility and subjective personal preference. The Mac OS does not garner the same driver support that Windows does - I can build my own PC, but I cannot build my own Mac. This forces me into a monopoly of sorts for support - Apple must be my sole source for most parts (I could use my own RAM or HDD, but I wouldn't be able to change the motherboard, and other components that require drivers may not work either). I jsut don't like that. Further, much of the software I use is not available for the Mac OS. I could run Windows as a virtual machine...but then I'm running Windows anyway.I've been a Windows user at the systems administrator level for a while now, and that means I'm extremely familiar with Windows and its workings. When I want to release/renew an IP address, or check error logs, or reinstall a driver, I know exactly what to do on a PC. On a Mac, I'm completely lost. I'm better than a complete neophyte because I at lease understand all of the terminology in the menus, but the loss of the basic familiarity is frankly annoying to me: I feel like a basic user cludging around without knowing what I'm doing and everything is counter-intuitive. I dislike that feeling.This is likely not the case for someone who feels less comfortable in Windows. My definition of "intuitive" has been shaped by Windows usage for decades. For those who have not had that experience, the Mac OS may be more intuitive than Windows.So I remain a PC guy for simple reasons of compatibility, the ability to do-it-myself for everything (I rather enjoy building computers), and my level of familiarity with Windows OSes. I don't even get to the point of comparing cost - I'd pay more for a PC to have those things, even though the reverse is typically true and a comparable Mac will cost me more money.By the way - Windows 7 is great. It's very similar to Vista, but with significantly improved...everything, really. Performance in the applications I use most frequently increased noticeably. It was quite frankly the quickest and easiest OS installation I've ever done, excluding restoring a desktop from a ghost image. Driver support is great, since it uses the same drivers Vista used and which are now universally available (as opposed to at the Vista launch, where driver support was spotty because they couldn't continue to use legacy drivers). I managed to install it on my lunch break, it was so quick and easy (and it automatically configured itself for dual-boot for my still-existent Vista64 OS, without me needing to do anything at all, which I found impressive). 32bit applications still work just fine, and I can take full advantage of a 64bit processor and (more importantly) the additional memory addressing space (4GB+ RAM with a 32bit OS = fail).Frankly, unless a major flaw in Windows 7 is exposed that MS does not immediately fix, Apple can kiss my shiny metal ass.

I've gone through 3 computers in my time. My first was a dell that I bought with windows 98 back in the late 90s. When xp came out I put it on there and it still worked just fine. Lasted me all the way through college. Half way through college, I bought a dell laptop. That also lasted until my dumb-ass left it on on the bed and overheated it.The only reason I bought my latest computer was because I got tired of running all the softwares I was using for work on a pentium 3 cpu.On the other hand, I've known people whose macs died on them.My point is don't just buy so-called top-of-the-line stuff. Pay attention to the manufacturers of the hardwares. I remember reading an article years ago how a major computer company (can't remember if it was hp, dell, or some other company) finally figured out why their chips kept failing prematurely. After months of investigation, they figured out that the problem was in the workers in Malaysia who used their thumbs to push those microchips in place rather than using the appropriate devices.

I'm about to order a new laptop, probably a hi-spec Vaio. I'm tempted to pay a stupid amount to have it with a 256gb SSD hard drive. Anyone have an opinon on this?

I don't know anything about SSD, but looking up the specs of SSD versus HDD online, SSD seems to have slower access rates, reading at up to 260MB/s while HDD has up to 3000MB/s. But you have to balance this against the latency of HDD, which is the average time it takes for the proper place on the disk to rotate under the read/write heads. My guess is that the two roughly balance out, but I did notice that SDD vendors are boasting of modestly better performance, especially for boot of Windows.But there are other important factors, like power consumption and lifetime. An idle SDD consumes far less power than an HDD. And I've seen MTBFs for SDDs of over a million hours, which is over a century.So even for as much as $3/GB, SDD seems like a good deal to me if 256GB is enough and you can afford it, plus maybe when your family sees it they'll realize that this world is amazing enough all by itself and they don't need magicland. I think 500GB is maybe available now, or should be soon.--Percy

I do not understand this but have been meaning to research it for awhile. I started to get suspicious about MTBF after losing HDD's at the rate of about 10% per year. With MTBF's in the 100,000 + hour range this should not happen.I'll come back later with some information but it appears MTBF's are not measured under conditions that correspond well to the real world and are not a meaningful measure of failure rates. There are 2 other measures which are much shorter but I don't have time to find that information again. Later today.I have worried about SDD's because I know regular flash memory (for cameras etc.) have a limited write cycle capability and I had presumed this would apply to an SDD too. I have never seen any good comparison on any of this.

I think SSD is next year's technology. Undoubtably superior to magnetic platters for most applications but still too pricey to be worth it.

They do, which could be problematic for swap files but is unlikely to be for anything else. Other than that they're a massively more stable technology.

Hi Percy, everyone else,I've been experimenting with Linux (puppy, knopix and ubuntu) and am impressed with the speed of bootup compared to windoze on the same machine.The puppy linux I have loaded on a bootable USB (thumb\flash\pen) drive and it is a very simple OS that boots in less time than all the others. I back it up by copying it to another flash drive. I can even remove the hard-drive and still boot up and run (it loads the whole OS into RAM so operation is fast), and you can save the configuration back to the flash drive.The only issue I have is getting the programs to use wifi, as it seems a lot of wifi drivers are fixed for windoze.Other than that issue, I can put my flash drive into any computer that boots from USB and boot into my computer, from a device that fits easily in my pocket. The future indeed.Enjoy.

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Hi cavediver,I would definitely go with the SSD. Sony Vaio is also an excellent choice IMHO as long as you're also using the intel chip. upgrading to a future better disk drive is pretty easy these days too. If you should invest in the 256GB SSD then upgrading it and then using the old drive for a portable type carry around will also be possible. You will get your full usage out of that drive so don't worry about the extra cost for now. If you're dealing with alot of digital pictures music files and movies or other big files (like me) 256GB will get used up in not too long of a time.

Percy, your post is mixture of apples and oranges. The 260MB/s (B=bytes) is the peak speed of the actual SSD device. The 3000Mb/s (b=bits, not bytes) is the peak speed of the of the bus (the SATA bus in this case). Just because a stretch of highway can support a Farari going 200 mph doesn't mean your Yugo is going to go that fast. HDD's will rarely reach even a third of this speed due to lots of overhead factors and actual device speed. Since the data, particularly for long files, is usually fragmented all over a HDD, the HDD will often spend most of its time seeking the various track positions. This might also explain in part why actual experience gives much lower MTBFs than shown in the specs.Also, the device speed of an HHD depends on where on the disc the data is: because the disc spins at a constant speed and the data is packed at a uniform density, the HDD will read/write data about twice as fast from the outer edge of the disk as from the inner edge. One way to get around this is to use two HDD in tandem in a RAID 0 (so called striping mode) where the date is partitioned into multiple segments that are alternately read from/written to the outer edge of one disk and the inner edge of the other disk. Unfortunately, controllers to do this are only targeted toward commercial applications and are quite expensive. This also halves the reliability.Taking all this into account, the SSD should be noticeably faster than any HDD. Cost of SSD is about 20-30 times higher than HDD ($3/GB vs. $0.10/GB), but this is currently due the incredible demand for flash memory (for phones, cameras, thumb sticks, PDAs, and now SSDs, and just about every electronic product made). It is a sellers market. If the vendors ever catch up with demand, I'd expect the prices to drop substantially, but always be considerably higher than disk storage.SSDs are now almost exclusively developed for the laptop market and all the emphasis is on lowering power to extend battery life. As prices come down and more SSDs are used on desktops, I suspect that there will be a different set of SSD models that emphasize speed and that this will be blazing fast. They will probably even come up with a new specialized bus to take full advantage of the SSD potential instead of handicapping it with the HDD-centric SATA bus. By the way, a new 6-Gbit/sec SATA bus spec has been approved and some models are now on the market that use this bus, but it will be a much greater advantage to SSDs than HDDs.I think the best strategy would be to use a medium capacity SSD for operating system, oft used applications, and temp files - 64GB might be adequate for this - and to use the HDD for longer term data storage and to back up the SSD. This should not only optimize the system for speed but also greatly reduce the load on the HDD, extending its life.Sorry for the long tirade on this subject, but as someone who is fascinated by new technology, I find the emergence of the SSD 'paradigm' to be particularly fascinating. Some pundits (are they listed in the phonebook under P?) even predict that HDDs will go the way of tape drives for storage. Particularly fascinating is the institutional aspects of this technology: HDD manufacturers, who have always had a tenuous financial situation, now find themselves challenged by a whole new, entirely alien industry. How this plays out will be fun to watch. Apple (Jobs) seems to be committed to taking a lead position in this arena.

Hi Answers,Just to keep people from becoming confused, where you mention "apples and oranges" you appear to be saying the same thing I did, just in different terms and in a bit more detail. I covered what you described when I said this, and you quoted me saying it: About this: At some point this should be true, but it wasn't true a short time ago. One test from a year and a half ago (Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs) gave the thumbs down to SDDs. I wasn't able to find any recent performance comparison tests of SSD versus HDD PCs, but I've seen claims of modestly better performance of SSDs over HDDs. Comments like this from the PCWorld article Windows 7 Speeds on Solid State Drives indicate that while this developing technology has a lot of potential, it is not without it's drawbacks: Another problem I saw alluded to but could find no good details was that SSDs gradually wear out. This is from Solid-State Drives Go Mainstream: And since Nosy raised doubts about MTBF claims, the same article included this: Better controllers and other technology improvements will address problems like these and it seems to me that SSDs should eventually far surpass HDDs, but for today we seem only to be at approximately the crossover point in performance when measured across a number of factors.Cavediver hasn't piped in for a while, but thank God he's a physicist and can follow this detail. Oftentimes we find ourselves giving computer advice to some hopeless newbie for whom more information only equals more confusion.--Percy

I'm here, and reading Just way too busy. So thanks for all the input. The wear levelling algorithms and consequent fragmentation is what interests me. It seems that fragmentation can descend into a dangerous level where recovery is difficult, and there are practical tips on how to prevent this happening even at the user level!! Not the sort of thing I care to have to worry about. So it's this sort of thing that I could do with appreciating better. The classic pros of the SSD are extremely appealing, and the consumer in me may find itself going this way despite the above concerns...