Looking for my 1st Mac

[Draner]

I'd say price is another downside

Mark

Granted the cost of a new one is quite high, but a quick look at the second hand value. Eg. I paid 1100 quid for mine 3 years ago, I could put it on ebay tomorrow and get £600. So £500 over 3 years. you could easily spend that on a PC and not expect much more than 3 years out of it IMO

[mgibbs]

I'd want more than 3 years out of a pc - especially if I paid as much as £500 for one

Mark

[Justin]

Windows 7 or XP Pro.....32 or 64 bit....anyone any opinions on what's the best?

[Draner]

I think it's personal preference between 7 and xp. But 64 bit is better if u want more than 3 or 4 gb of ram

[mgibbs]

Windows 7 is better than xp in most respects. It is, however, a different look and feel so will seem quite different at first.

Nearly all Windows 7 pcs sold now are 64 bit. If yu want 32 bit you'll have less choice and will probably pay a higher price.

Unless you work in a domain environment I don't think you'd need to pay the extra for pro over home.

Mark

[smitch6]

gotta jump on this (being a mac loverrrrr)
win 7 is lossely based on a mac there's so much which is similar it's funny

Apple are bringing out a new OS soon i had the email a few weeks back and i think it'll be around the £30 mark
how often can you buy a genuine win OS for that sorta money??

i would NEVER go back to windows
the wife has a windows pc as she has to for work and there's the odd programme which will not run on a mac like my embroidery one
so i have to use her lappy and i hate every second of it lol
it takes ages to start up and shut down it's always freezing (although saying that when i'm using PS5 my mac struggles when i have about 5+ documents open ) lol

[mgibbs]

Windows will start up much more quickly if you use Sleep or Hibernation modes to shut it down.

Mark

[Justin]

Whilst I decide which way to go longer term I'm having a play with Windows 7 64 bit. Initial thoughts are that it's running better than XP but I'm not running masses of memory or a particularly powerful system right now.

[djhutton]

Hate win 7 - just cannot get used to not having outlook express too!

Same here, not keen on all the large 'buttons' on windows live mail. Might have a solution though - have just purchased Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus from software4students.co.uk for under £40. (they don't ask for any student number)

Includes outlook so that might be a good option to get back to the outlook type email. Also MS Live mail won't sync with contacts on iphone which is a pain whereas outlook and outlook express seem to work nicely.

Be interesting to see how that goes.

Also looking a mac (imac) at the mo as I fancy a change, sounds like the emulation software works ok for using the odd windows program - we'll see

DJ

[mgibbs]

An alternative to the Micro$oft mail offerings is Thunderbird from Mozilla (the Firefox people).

Mark