[TheSpaz]

I am at my friends house right now. He's got an HP Pavilion mx75 (which means nothing to me) and I wanted to check the MacNN forums on it so I booted it up.

I never use WindowsXP so I just watched it start up. It didn't take very long to start up actually, but when it got to the desktop I couldn't click anything and I couldn't do anything until it was finished loading things (so much for that fast startup time).

I was still waiting there watching the "busy cursor" blink on and off. Finally it stopped blinking, but the horror doesn't stop there.

Soon after I saw an HP toolbar pop-up on the top of the screen... it was kinda distracting so I closed it. Quickly after a search box popped-up so I closed that. Then I saw things appearing in the "Start" menu. (pop-up blocker, anti-popup-ware, weather bug and so on).

I still couldn't click anything so I sat there and waited for a while staring at the desktop. Finally everything finished loading... but, I still couldn't click the start menu, so I said F**K it and opened Internet Explorer. It didn't get far when IE froze half-way into opening a webpage, so I "cntrl-alt-deleted" it's ass, but it still didn't go away. The "Start" menu was still frozen and so was the entire OS. (note: the "busy cursor" was still active). I restarted and went throught the same thing, but somehow I got it working finally. I am writing this story on this piece of crap.

I hardly ever use WindowsXP, but if I was a new computer user, I wouldn't want this crap because I would go crazy.

So basically.. CHEERS TO MAC OS X! THE BEST OS ON THE MARKET!

It's just too bad that not EVERYONE has "seen the light". I pine for them.

Anyone have comments on this story or have similar stories about PC-using hell?

[Hop Pocket]

You have experienced a PC belonging to someone who apparently must download every Bonzi Buddy like item off of the internet, and god knows what else.

It's nice that OSX is not as vulnerable to the crap that PCs are, but it's not too hard to keep a PC running healthy. The problem is, most people who use PCs are unaware of how to do this.

It's much easier to do this on a Mac. Hence, I only use a PC when I must (work!).

[andretan]

I've a HP Pavilion at home too. Same thing. XP boots up pretty fast, but slows down to a crawl after that.

The thing is that I don't have those stupid apps (those Bonzi crap) running at startup.

And that's a Pentium 4 2.53GHz!

My G3 700MHz iBook seems much faster. Much much faster.

[Hop Pocket]

Originally posted by andretan:
I've a HP Pavilion at home too. Same thing. XP boots up pretty fast, but slows down to a crawl after that.

The thing is that I don't have those stupid apps (those Bonzi crap) running at startup.

And that's a Pentium 4 2.53GHz!

My G3 700MHz iBook seems much faster. Much much faster.

I'll agree that it sometimes takes some time after you get the Desktop in XP to be able to do something. But on a p4 2.5 this should not be more than 5-10 seconds, unless you have a lot of startup programs (which you may or may not be able to see during this process).

I just put together a PC for my roommate (p4 2.6), and it has pretty much zero delay when you get to the desktop. There is something outside of XP that is causing this.

[Sarc]

of all the PC users I know, only two keep their PC's healthy, one is the power-user kind of geek (much like any MacNN'er), the other one is a campus tecnician kind of geek.

other than those 2, every other friend of mine, gets his/her PC to slow to a crawl in about 2 weeks after a fresh install. and since they don't know half the things they do, they can't solve any problems, hence the PC is doomed to another fresh install it's so slow it becomes unusable (about 4-6 more weeks)

[mitchell_pgh]

I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip... I flew to Chicago and ended up visiting a friend who just got a Cannon G5 digital camera. He opened it up, and took some photos. When we got back to the apartment, he started installing the drivers on a (somewhat new) Windows XP box. Everything seemed fine, but when you plugged the camera into the computer, it wouldn't work. So we tinkered and tinkered. I originally thought it might be the USB drivers or perhaps the cable, but we tested both on an external hard drive he had. That worked.

Tinker, tinker, tinker... I had a USB Compact Flash card reader with me, so I tried that... It didn't work either. So we downloaded newer drivers for the USB card, the camera and the card reader.

Finally, we got the thing working...

I opened up the four year old powerbook, plugged the camera into the computer, and it worked like a charm. iPhoto blew him away.

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

[andretan]

Originally posted by Hop Pocket:
I'll agree that it sometimes takes some time after you get the Desktop in XP to be able to do something. But on a p4 2.5 this should not be more than 5-10 seconds, unless you have a lot of startup programs (which you may or may not be able to see during this process).

I just put together a PC for my roommate (p4 2.6), and it has pretty much zero delay when you get to the desktop. There is something outside of XP that is causing this.

Well, technically, it shouldn't. But that's what happened to me.

After I get to the Desktop, it takes about 2 minutes for me to even get to see stuff in the Start button.

Maybe it's the RAM. It's got a stock DDR-256MB (can't remember DDR-what) in there. BUT my iBook also has 256MB of PC-100 RAM. Go figure.

[richf]

first thing I do on any pre-built PC is do a clean reinstall of XP to get rid of all the crud the manufacturer puts on there. I guess the casual user doesn't want to go through that. Anyway, I have 2 PCs, one for real "work" that doesn't get any extraneous stuff installed and one I consider a sacrificial lamb. XP works great when you don't ask too much of it..

[chris v]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip... I flew to Chicago and ended up visiting a friend who just got a Cannon G5 digital camera. He opened it up, and took some photos. When we got back to the apartment, he started installing the drivers on a (somewhat new) Windows XP box. Everything seemed fine, but when you plugged the camera into the computer, it wouldn't work. So we tinkered and tinkered. I originally thought it might be the USB drivers or perhaps the cable, but we tested both on an external hard drive he had. That worked.

Tinker, tinker, tinker... I had a USB Compact Flash card reader with me, so I tried that... It didn't work either. So we downloaded newer drivers for the USB card, the camera and the card reader.

Finally, we got the thing working...

I opened up the four year old powerbook, plugged the camera into the computer, and it worked like a charm. iPhoto blew him away.

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

Yeah, but did you save Christmas?

A digicam and Image Capture/iPhoto are the first things I show off to anyone interested who's from the Widows side. Taking a random camera and having it "just work" always shocks people used to the Microsoft way.

CV

[spatterson]

Originally posted by Sarc:
of all the PC users I know, only two keep their PC's healthy, one is the power-user kind of geek (much like any MacNN'er), the other one is a campus tecnician kind of geek.

other than those 2, every other friend of mine, gets his/her PC to slow to a crawl in about 2 weeks after a fresh install. and since they don't know half the things they do, they can't solve any problems, hence the PC is doomed to another fresh install it's so slow it becomes unusable (about 4-6 more weeks)

True, True, True... I have a PC and well it is very tiring to sit there trying to fix everything that loads on startup, and keep you system clean by using MSCONFIG. To prevent pop-up you have to purchase software to prevent what you don't want to see, and even then their software gets in the way. I am tired of formatting my hard drive every 4 to 6 months just because M$ collapses on its self. As you can see in the signature I am preparing to give XP the book. Goodbye M$... Cheers�

[kelesh]

playing devils advocate here:

2 things:
first, HP Pavilions are absolute crap, any HP PC in my experience, so comparing it to that is crap
and second, the difference between osx and windows is that it takes some knowledge, work and skill to keep windows lean and mean, whereas OSX seems to do that itself because of its nature.

my pc is a built-from-parts 2 year old machine(except for the new radeon 9700 pro video card), and it boots as fast as my tibook 1ghz. logging in they each take about 15 seconds to load everything up before i can start actually using it.

my pc is really just for playing games these days... OSX is so much prettier and more fun. i have actually skinned my XP with an OSX skin... hehe screenshot

[spatterson]

Originally posted by kelesh:
playing devils advocate here:

2 things:
first, HP Pavilions are absolute crap, any HP PC in my experience, so comparing it to that is crap
and second, the difference between osx and windows is that it takes some knowledge, work and skill to keep windows lean and mean, whereas OSX seems to do that itself because of its nature.

my pc is a built-from-part 2 year old machine(except for the new radeon 9700 pro video card), and it boots as fast as my tibook 1ghz. logging in they each take about 15 seconds to load everything up before i can start actually using it.

my pc is really just for playing games these days... OSX is so much prettier and more fun. i have actually skinned my XPX with an OSX skin... hehe screenshot

Widnows binds 4, right? That is what I use to skin my desktop.

[brachiator]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip...

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

Go, Lombard, Go! I am still using the Lombard I bought at the beginning of law school in August 1999. With Panther, it has been granted a new lease on life, to some extent.

BTW, chris_v, that switcher commercial about saving Christmas is a true classic! That Janie Porche was just cute as a bug.

[Zemrec]

Well, I'll agree that Windows is a gigantic pile of steaming turd. However its not really Microsoft's fault that newbies have problems with pop-ups, spy/adware, viruses, worms, etc.

Mostly it's because 90+% of personal computers run Windows, so that's where all the advertisers and low-lifes who make this junk target their "wares".

I support computer users for my job, and I hate it. Believe me, I wish I could make it all go away. Or better yet make people buy Macs instead.

But then again...if a large population of Windows "switchers" suddenly bought Macs, guess who's going to start targetting the Mac OS X for all the crap we hate in the Windows world?

I think its nice being in the minority. Gives you a little anonymity and protection. Would you really want to be in the majority who listen to crappy, comercialized pop music, or be one who listens to more classey stuff?

[kelesh]

Originally posted by spatterson:
Widnows binds 4, right? That is what I use to skin my desktop.

indeed

[MusicalTone]

Hey, dont be so full of it.

My 15" PP SD can take a while to load everything up on startup too.

[zoe77]

A digicam and Image Capture/iPhoto are the first things I show off to anyone interested who's from the Widows side. Taking a random camera and having it "just work" always shocks people used to the Microsoft way.

CV [/B]

but iMovie n iPhoto are embarassingly slow to do a demo, esp on an iMac or iBook with 10.2.... *shudder*

[Samanoske]

Originally posted by Hop Pocket:
You have experienced a PC belonging to someone who apparently must download every Bonzi Buddy like item off of the internet, and god knows what else.

lol+

[Brass]

Originally posted by Hop Pocket:
You have experienced a PC belonging to someone who apparently must download every Bonzi Buddy like item off of the internet, and god knows what else.

It's nice that OSX is not as vulnerable to the crap that PCs are, but it's not too hard to keep a PC running healthy. The problem is, most people who use PCs are unaware of how to do this.

It's much easier to do this on a Mac. Hence, I only use a PC when I must (work!).

You are right. But the difference here is that on Mac OS X, this sort of rubbish only happens if the user(s) deliberately and conciously install things. On Windows, it happens without any significant interaction with the user, and the user has to deliberately and conciously take action to avoid it.

[Brass]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip... I flew to Chicago and ended up visiting a friend who just got a Cannon G5 digital camera. He opened it up, and took some photos. When we got back to the apartment, he started installing the drivers on a (somewhat new) Windows XP box. Everything seemed fine, but when you plugged the camera into the computer, it wouldn't work. So we tinkered and tinkered. I originally thought it might be the USB drivers or perhaps the cable, but we tested both on an external hard drive he had. That worked.

Tinker, tinker, tinker... I had a USB Compact Flash card reader with me, so I tried that... It didn't work either. So we downloaded newer drivers for the USB card, the camera and the card reader.

Finally, we got the thing working...

I opened up the four year old powerbook, plugged the camera into the computer, and it worked like a charm. iPhoto blew him away.

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

I had almost exactly the same experience when a friend bought a new Canon digital camera. After the Hell trying to get it to work on her Wintel laptop, we tried on on my iBook, (without installing anything) and it just worked.

Her next significant purchase was an iBook.

[drmcnutt]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip... I flew to Chicago and ended up visiting a friend who just got a Cannon G5 digital camera. He opened it up, and took some photos. When we got back to the apartment, he started installing the drivers on a (somewhat new) Windows XP box. Everything seemed fine, but when you plugged the camera into the computer, it wouldn't work. So we tinkered and tinkered. I originally thought it might be the USB drivers or perhaps the cable, but we tested both on an external hard drive he had. That worked.

Tinker, tinker, tinker... I had a USB Compact Flash card reader with me, so I tried that... It didn't work either. So we downloaded newer drivers for the USB card, the camera and the card reader.

Finally, we got the thing working...

I opened up the four year old powerbook, plugged the camera into the computer, and it worked like a charm. iPhoto blew him away.

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

"How much..." quite a bit since he'll need a mac and OSX for the free program.

DRM

[BlueCat]

Been a recent switcher from WinXP, I do have to say, as crap as everyone claims Windoze to be, XP is definitely (imho) the best Windows version so far. NT was a total joke, Win2K was a major improvement but XP is very good.

As richf mentioned, to make WinxP run well, you really need to install XP from scratch. Brand name PCs like HP, Dell, IBM, etc all have additional "crap' installed on top to make Windows so-called friendly and more importantly to try to make one vendor different to another.

Apart from my PB, I also have a PC with a AMD Duron 1Ghz (sorta equiv to a Celeron), 1GB DDR266 RAM, 40GB 7200rpm drive, 32MB Geforce compat graphics card and WinXP Pro. It takes just under a minute to load to desktop and this time includes me typing in my login details. Again, the only reason why this is quick is because it's a fresh install without all the crap that the vendors put in as part of their installs.

Now, having said all this ... Windows (even XP) is a classic case of Chaos theory - give it a few months (especially if you install and reinstall programs) and you will see it slow right down! One of my colleagues was he Projec Manager for a 1000+ Windows 2000 rollout project and he recommends, for optimum performance, rebuild/reimage windows every 3 months!!! What a joke!

OSX kicks butt over WinXP and I much prefer using my PB than any PC

[typoon]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip... I flew to Chicago and ended up visiting a friend who just got a Cannon G5 digital camera. He opened it up, and took some photos. When we got back to the apartment, he started installing the drivers on a (somewhat new) Windows XP box. Everything seemed fine, but when you plugged the camera into the computer, it wouldn't work. So we tinkered and tinkered. I originally thought it might be the USB drivers or perhaps the cable, but we tested both on an external hard drive he had. That worked.

Tinker, tinker, tinker... I had a USB Compact Flash card reader with me, so I tried that... It didn't work either. So we downloaded newer drivers for the USB card, the camera and the card reader.

Finally, we got the thing working...

I opened up the four year old powerbook, plugged the camera into the computer, and it worked like a charm. iPhoto blew him away.

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

Nice, Definate classic.

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by BlueCat:
Now, having said all this ... Windows (even XP) is a classic case of Chaos theory - give it a few months (especially if you install and reinstall programs) and you will see it slow right down! One of my colleagues was he Projec Manager for a 1000+ Windows 2000 rollout project and he recommends, for optimum performance, rebuild/reimage windows every 3 months!!! What a joke!

The 2000+ faculty personal office computers (not including machines at scheduling offices, etc.) at my medical center run 80% Win NT, 10% Win 2K and 10% Win XP (all going to XP by the end of the year). They all get AUTOMATICALLY re-ghosted every 3 months. Longer than that and the IT department gets too many troubleshooting calls. And it's not like people can even really mess up their machines on purpose... only selected users even have admin access on their machines. The OS is locked down pretty tight - can't even reorder the Internet Explorer tool bars

[gadster]

Originally posted by zoe77:
but iMovie n iPhoto are embarassingly slow to do a demo, esp on an iMac or iBook with 10.2.... *shudder*

iPhotos goes OK if you turn off the drop shadows around the little thumbnails.

[chris v]

Originally posted by Cadaver:
The 2000+ faculty personal office computers (not including machines at scheduling offices, etc.) at my medical center run 80% Win NT, 10% Win 2K and 10% Win XP (all going to XP by the end of the year). They all get AUTOMATICALLY re-ghosted every 3 months. Longer than that and the IT department gets too many troubleshooting calls. And it's not like people can even really mess up their machines on purpose... only selected users even have admin access on their machines. The OS is locked down pretty tight - can't even reorder the Internet Explorer tool bars

Jezus. That's pathetic. I just went nearly that long without even restarting my Dual gig at work. I finally gave up because I wanted to install 10.3. Ran DiskWarrior before doing so, and nary a problem, except for the usual "incorrect custom icon flags." on two or three fonts.

CV

[d4nth3m4n]

Originally posted by kelesh:
playing devils advocate here:

2 things:
first, HP Pavilions are absolute crap, any HP PC in my experience, so comparing it to that is crap
and second, the difference between osx and windows is that it takes some knowledge, work and skill to keep windows lean and mean, whereas OSX seems to do that itself because of its nature.

my pc is a built-from-parts 2 year old machine(except for the new radeon 9700 pro video card), and it boots as fast as my tibook 1ghz. logging in they each take about 15 seconds to load everything up before i can start actually using it.

my pc is really just for playing games these days... OSX is so much prettier and more fun. i have actually skinned my XP with an OSX skin... hehe screenshot

you left your pc on for almost 9 days? im thoroughly impressed

[iohead]

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
you left your pc on for almost 9 days? im thoroughly impressed

Heh ... when I left my last job, I had to turn off the Solaris (SPARC) machine on my desk. I used it pretty much every day at work. The uptime was 580 or so days. This also means I never patched or updated it either :-)

-A

[ApeInTheShell]

Originally posted by Zemrec:
Well, I'll agree that Windows is a gigantic pile of steaming turd. However its not really Microsoft's fault that newbies have problems with pop-ups, spy/adware, viruses, worms, etc.

Mostly it's because 90+% of personal computers run Windows, so that's where all the advertisers and low-lifes who make this junk target their "wares".

I support computer users for my job, and I hate it. Believe me, I wish I could make it all go away. Or better yet make people buy Macs instead.

But then again...if a large population of Windows "switchers" suddenly bought Macs, guess who's going to start targetting the Mac OS X for all the crap we hate in the Windows world?

I think its nice being in the minority. Gives you a little anonymity and protection. Would you really want to be in the majority who listen to crappy, comercialized pop music, or be one who listens to more classey stuff?

I don't think that is true. People have always speculated if Mac OS X became mainstream it would have the same problems as MS Windows.
There aren't spectacular applications for Mac OS X if you've perused versiontracker.com lately.
Too soon we all forget when Apple was the leader of the pack, were there people hacking into the Mac OS? I don't know.
I do know MS Windows has been vulnerable for too long because they created there own standards instead of using existing ones.
Another argument would be Mac OS X does not have to support multiple pc configurations.
I see this as an advantage and the reason Windows users would switch.
We know general Windows users have a gripe about Microsoft. The mac community has grudges against Apple but we offer them feedback and point out as many bugs as we can find. Microsoft is not concerned with this as much as they should be. That is why there are viruses, spyware, and hackers.

[daftpig]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I borrowed a 333 MHz G3 PowerBook from the office for a trip...

<snip>

"How much is that program", he said...

I just laughed.

In addition, you write very well. That was very very pleasant reading.

[kelesh]

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
you left your pc on for almost 9 days? im thoroughly impressed

my uptime is basically an indicator of how many days its been since the last windows security updates.

man, one thing windows and osx get wrong is that you have to restart for updates... its so annoying and its something most linux OS's don't require.

[theolein]

As someone whose most recent job was admin for 20 WinXP computers amongst other things, I can only agree with the general sentiment. Make no mistake, Win XP is definitely the best OS MS has ever made, and Apple has also made a series of snafus with 10.2.8 and 10.3 (Loss of networking, Hosed Firewire drives etc) but in terms of generla OS simplicity, security and maintenace OSX is light years in front of XP.

It might well be that eventually someone will start writing viruses for OSX, but I really can't see viruses being able to do much damage unless they target a flaw that gives them root privileges. Until then I am quite happy with Apple's security defaults and firewall.

In Windows XP, this is most definitely not the case. While a company computer might be behind a firewall on installing, a home computer definitely isn't and it's not unknown for Windows computers to get hit by viruses even before setup has finished if they are attached to the net. You definitely need to start the firewall and install an anti-virus programme. On top of this are the enormous amount of services that run by default on a Windows box (similar to processes on OSX). Many of those services are not needed and they are often the cultprits in making XP so slow to respond on startup.

And the constant stress of having to maintain Windows boxes really is tiresome. I think that Microsoft wil really have to change a lot of things in Longhorn to make their computers safe and easy for home users, as I have yet to see an Windows machine in the home that stays stable over a long period of time.

I am continually amazed at how OSX has been improving. Panther is making my old Lombard become a decent computer again (still have OS8.6 there for nostalgia as well) and it is certainly worth the money.