Hi guys

I've had PC since for ever (y2000) but I seem to spend more and more time trying to get them to do what I need them to do. I currently have 5 PCs,
Tower on XP
Tower on Win 8.1
Medion Laptop on Vista
2X Laptops on Win 10 up from Win 7 (one Dell, one HP)

There are so many issues I can't go into them all but it just seems that the 'open bonnet' philosophy created by IBM seems to cause never ending possibilities for one thing to be in conflict with another.

Do you think that the 'sealed box' philosophy of Mac, where everything is put together by the same company and designed to work together has its merits?

Now that everything in my digital world is PC, would it be the biggest headache ever to try to switch now? OR should I buy a super duper all singing all dancing expensive PC dream machine (as I've always bought on a budget)?

Thanks

Andrew

I got a Macbook back in 2013 because my Windows XP laptop died and I didn't like the look of Windows 8. The Macbook is still going strong - I'm typing on it now. I still have a Windows 7 desktop machine and in some ways I prefer the Windows system of file management but if I had to choose one OS only I'd stick with Mac. Windows drove me crazy with constant updates, security patches, antivirus blah blah blah. None of that with a Mac and In fact I can't imagine buying a new Windows machine again.

Sounds like you have some old hardware there, similar to me! 1 x 16 year old laptop with XP that I'm keeping for ripping vinyl and very occasionally running some old work software that needs the parallel port, another similar vintage desktop upgraded to Win7 with a firewire card that I just used recently to re-transfer DV 40+ tapes, several old Pentium laptops with replaced HDDs, a couple of other chromebook-type things, plus all the other family laptops with the latest one upgraded to Win10 from Win8 just last week. The biggest issue I have is keeping MS Office up to date, clearing out all the bloatware that comes pre-installed and stops working, and worst of all having to work out why the damned things run so slowly now, meaning I have to disable things that autorun at startup, kill apps one by one to see if its them that's consuming all the HDD access, memory or CPU time, and then trying to uninstall them, without time even to figure out where they came from. Funny how it's only the wife's and kids' PCs that seem to be afflicted however.

If you have a lot of music, videos and other files, they may be scattered around different HDDs on different PCs, external HDDs, USB memory sticks and even memory cards, CDs and DVDs. Apart from making sure they are all backed up (maybe even twice) I would be tempted to consolidate into one PC with a huge HDD (terrabytes not gigabytes) and look into NAS. The old twin HDD NAS that I used to have sadly croaked taking both RAID1 disks with it and I've had several other laptop HDD failures over the years. Sadly even brand new expensive PCs become old very quickly and can be just as prone to failure. If I didn't need that parallel or firewire port I could get rid of those older PCs (a newer PC with a firewire socket sadly failed to work)

What sort of issues are you having? Of course you could treat yourself to a brand spanking new superexpensive Apple PC but how many other new compatibility issues might that create with so much legacy Windows PC stuff?

Until recently, I’d have unhesitatingly recommended the Mac. What has happened since is that
- Apple have killed my Mac Mini with a Mac OS update and there’s pretty much nothing I can do to update the Mac to improve that performance. I only updated it because Safari was no longer working with YouTube etc
- I’m onto my 3rd iPad Pro in 3 months because they keep failing. Oh, and it takes 2 weeks per failure to turn them around.
- I have a beautiful and flawless looking iMac that equally can’t be updated. I couldn’t even use it to diagnose my previous iPad Pro that just stopped working and was going to be at least £350 to fix if sent away.
- My Apple Pencil that I bought for my original iPad Pro won’t work with the new iPad Pro
- I use a Mac at work and all of the Office 365 stuff for Mac is just a bit crappier that it is on a PC.

I contrast this with the (very) high-end Sony Vaio desktop that kept going for ever because it was possible to update the components. And there are still apps and hardware that won’t run on Macs without Bootcamp or a VM and that’s just tedious - especially as disc space on Macs is so expensive.

To cut a long story short, I bought a high-end gaming PC instead of a Mac recently. I don’t regret that decision for a second.

Personally, I think Apple have lost their way with quality and are verging on sociopathic when it comes to customer service. By the time you’re sending a second replacement for a 3 month old, £1000, iPad, you’d have thought they’d have done something a bit better than a 2 week turnaround. Contrast that with Microsoft who gave my son a complete refund on his 2-year old high-end laptop when it started to have problems. Apple also lied to me around battery problems on my iPhone 7.

I never thought I’d be recommending MS over Apple - but I am.

Since v interesting points there.

My mate is a Mac fan and only has iPhone and Mac books, but he was bemoaning the lack of ability to upgrade his mac book Pro which has nothing else wrong with it. He'd been looking to change to a new mac book pro but at something like £3k?? And even the mac book air started at £1200 or something for a basic model.

I do find windows updates annoying, but in recent years and the change to Windows 10 seems to be less buggy. My 10 year old Dell Studio 17 is still going strong and I've upgraded the drive to a 1TB hybrid SSD and maxed out the RAM to 8GB. Still runs most stuff fine. I can't see myself changing to Mac despite owning a couple of iPhones.

One question I do have is, what do people think of PC antivirus etc? My IT mate reckons that the built in windows security essentials of Windows 10 is fine on its own for most people.

This is all very enlightening.

One thing that is essential to me is recording music that is playing within the PC (now called stereo mix). XP had total and perfect control over recording and playback sources, why would anyone want to change 'perfect'? With subsequent version of Windows it has got harder and harder to control. All 4 machines had no 'stereo mix' and I could not get it back (XP machine is not operational at all despite reinstall) My PC tech guy recommended 'Voice Meeter' and that solved that problem and bypassed the 'stereo mix' requirement.

My wife said she would ask her boss as she uses iMac and blow me she said I could borrow her old 21.5" from 2011 that she is about to give to someone else, so wifey came home with it in the car. I was playing with it last night, but the thing is, over the last 20 years I have used and stuck with Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Auditions) for music production and editing, Photoshop 6 for photos &graphics, Outlook Express 6, and PowerPoint 2000 for presentations (backing tracks). I have never looked at an updated version of any of these and thought 'wow, that's much better' only ever thought well that is worse as I now don't know my way around it. An example is in PP 2000 if an inserted track has had its name changed it will ask you if you want to search for it manually - easy. In PP 2004/7 it just tells you the link is not valid, end of, so I stuck with PP 2000. Neither Windows nor Apple like people sticking with old programs, and hardware like my old Epsom r200 printer. I looked at how to put Windows onto iMac with Bootcamp, but only found info on how to put Win10 onto iMacOS from 2012 an more recent. Again older stuff like 'High Sierra OS' they are not interested.

I am 59 years of age (probably sound like 80 from what I've said above) and I think it will take me another 20 years to master MacOS the way I know my way around the programs mentioned above. From the comments above, Mac has its fans, but it is not the 'silver bullet' I believed it might be. It's just so unbearable that when you have a problem that you can spend days hitting your head against, you just need that one little bit of information, that one little hidden checkbox or whatever, that solves the whole problem in a second.

Conclusion - Computers are all the same. When they work they are brilliant. When they don't;

Started to use a Mac in 1988 and never looked back. Regarding PC wouldn't even know how to switch one on.

Over the years I must of had every Mac that came out. One Mac I only bought because I loved the design, never used it, one day I will switch in on.

All my Macs have worked without fault. My current everyday Mac is made specially for me by my local Apple repair shop it's made from various Apple components and built to suit my requirements. This was done around 10 years ago it's used around 8 hours every day over that time period. In that time It's only need mouse replacement.

Wife's PC has to be replaced roughly each year due to internal faults. Currently she's on her second one this year.

Wife's PC always seems so slow, but that might be me.

Macs everyday for me.

Wow, that endorsement is so ringing it hurt my tinnitus.

Although that you had every new iMac ever, and your current one is ten years old, seems at odds. What does your wife do to hers ?

Thing is, familiarity is key. Just as you wouldn't know how to turn a PC on, so in playing with the iMac I've borrowed I couldn't go back from one folder to the previous. I Binged it, answer was confusing as I couldn't see 'back' button, then found it with right click to task bar, but found new folders open in new windows. Closing window goes back to desktop, have to click on 'finder' again to open previous folder. Total faff. Now you can laugh and say well it's easy, you do this and this and there you go, but the point is it wasn't intuitive (for me being used to PC). If I have to google just for basic tasks then it really will take me 20 years to master.

I have decided to give the iMac back and persevere with pc, but perhaps I'll go for a 'dream machine'. Funny thing is £1500 seems a huge amount to pay for a computer today, and yet that's what my very first computer (Time laptop) cost in 1999 and that was nothing compared to the s/h Dell laptop I bought recently for £150.

Quick update before the Macafosie think I've lost it, suddenly going forward and back works just like Windows but I swear it wasn't doing that before, and I've no idea why it's changed. I still don't like the icon view though (doesn't fill all the space available) and don't like list view (which is like 'details' view).

And this is a great point. I work a lot with Human Factors/Usability experts and they will say that there’s no such thing as “intuitive”: everything is compared to our frame of reference and our previous experiences. If you’re a Mac user, a Mac will seem “intuitive” - same goes for PCs and a Windows user.

Ultimately, though, the main difference between the platforms is flexibility and customisation - and, on either side of that fence, it’s a double-edged sword.

This is all changeable - by hitting the yellow at top lhs it will store your file in the dock ready for clicking on - or I thin k there are ways to split screen (which I don't use). In fact this is one of the beauties of the Mac, it's a designer's dream - sounds right up your street. I use Open Office for any documents (not that I use many).

If you want to fill the screen with icons either drag up the lower screen corner or increase the icon size

Safari doesn't let you change the font much but if you install Firefox (or Chrome) it's no bother, in fact I prefer using it to Safari as it seems to let me have more choice over the layout. You can make it your default browser if req.

I'd never go for a PC now as I prefer the look of a Mac and they're safer by all accounts.

The purchase cost though was ameliorated by educational discount....

Some of my newer Macs never get use or very rarely. There all excellent machines but I still go back to the one built for me. If you have a particular requirement maybe get one made for you. It doesn't have to be based on the latest Mac, maybe go for Mac Pro then have it rebuilt to suit you.

Re-reading my previous post it comes across a bit fanboy for Mac. I've just spent a half hour fighting the Mac to make it save an email attachment, so here's a more nuanced view:
Macbook is brilliant as a portable computer on holiday. Always connects to wifi, great for browsing the net etc., lightweight and good battery life.
Not so good IMO as an office machine when you want to put files in your own folder structure, easily find them and move them about or send them somewhere. Apple is a control freak - the Photos app is particularly unfriendly and seems designed to frustrate the user. So maybe I would buy another Windows machine in future as an office workhorse. But the Macbook would be my choice for a portable. Horses for courses. I don't find it difficult to use both systems.

I have actually continued to play with the iMac and I have to say I love the machine itself, so clean in design, so silent, so classy, and I guess you do find ways to do things the way you want to, like I've now got the mouse scroll wheel going the way I want it, not that there is anything wrong with the wheel going the other way, but after all this time on Windows...

But I have about 450gb of stuff on an external usb drive, lots of Word, PowerPoint, movies in .wmv etc etc, and the drive is 'read only' so there would be so much conversion to do. I asked my local computer guy about putting Windows on the iMac, and he said that kind of avoids the point of having a iMac. However, it's working, it's almost free (I'd have to give my wife's boss something - but boy, do I love a bargain), and it's silent. The one thing I do know about all computers though, the more stuff you put on it, the slower it goes, so putting Win 10 on this might just take me back to slowsville again.

Using Open Office on my macbook, when you want to open a file in it initially it will ask " Open with" when you press Control and trackpad. Select Open Office from the Finder application page when it pops up and you should be able to select "open all files with this application from now on" or something similar.

I don't use Safari at all, Firefox for email and forum, Chrome for anything else

Mrs Ed's macbook is set up to scroll in the opposite diraction to mine (the way she wants it) so using hers for any reason is quie confusing!

You can "Remove from Dock" any items you don't use, set your downloads in Preferences to go where you want, avail yourself of Facetime....everything you feel like personalising is accessible through System Preferences under the Apple icon.

I have to use windows for work and its an exercise in frustration. I honestly see know reason for it over Linux. I've used MACs a few times and think they are irrational and basically stupid to use for example want to get a CD out? drag the CD to the recycle bin. Don't worry this wont do the logical thing and erase it; no it will eject it WTF. MAC.
Only thing worse than window is MAC.

My silent Linux workstation has two very high end GPU ( one has 12GB ram) for separate purposes and 16 cores of 4GHz CPU 128GB Ram. The works rubbish windows laptop thing has 2 core 2 ish ghz no GPU slow as hell and screams as the fan is always at 100%. That is not windows fault its a stupid small cheep laptop. Macs are not cheep and not cheep lends its self to not being half arsed.

Linux. No argument - unless you *have* to use particular software for which there is no usable linux equivalent.

Windows is a usability nightmare... rolling back to Rich's point about human factors, MS's idea of an improvement is to hide settings in a different place every time they perform an update; you need to learn the whole interface anew every time. I'd argue that W10 is still nowhere nearly as useful as W7 was - and I still prefer Linux (Mint for my taste, but of course this is Linux - you an get *anything*!) on this three-year old Dell laptop.

That said - most people are happy if they can browse the web, watch/listen to videos/music/podcasts, and send emails to granny. For which, any old OS with a browser does the job.

If you're into games, I guess you're into Windows like it or not, but that's not my thing so I can't really comment.

(re speed: I wrote an emulator for an old processor and I wrote it so it would compile for either windows or linux. A test suite runs in five and a bit minutes on this old Linux; it takes just under three hours on W10 on the allegedly better specced work laptop. Both 16GB ram, i5 processor on the Dell, i7 on the work machine, 2TB disc on the Dell, 500GB SSD on the work machine. Go figure.)

The number of people that look at a Mac and give up because the menu is at the top always amazes me.

Still I grew up with an Amiga so having it a the bottom was always going to be weird.

OK. So my wife's boss now wishes to give the iMac to the person she kind of promised it to before, so the option of the cheep iMac is no longer on the table. The W10 Dell laptop has stopped regularly freezing after opening a few apps so I'm working with that now despite the fact that the old XP is now working almost perfectly after a visit from the computer guy and he sorted out the driver. As the laptop is silent, and freeware called 'VoiceMeeter' has solved the missing 'stereo mix', I'm using that for most things.

The one big draw to an aio like the iMac is the system wholistic-ness and guaranteed screen compatibility. The Dell has a VGA and HDMI out. I have 2 screens; a cheep telly from Tesco with VGA and HDMI in and that has an odd native res of 1680x1050, plus I have a 4:3 monitor at 1600x1200 with DVI in only (and I am loath to throw either out), both over 20". The XP PC runs into the monitor perfectly at 1600x1200, But the Dell laptop is strange. When I connected it to the telly VGA-VGA it runs at the correct res and correct ratio (i.e. a square is a true square), but there is an every so slight 'flicker' to the picture (and I do mean ever so slight - but noticeable). When I connect it HDMI-HDMI goes down to 720p (I think - the box that should show the res in settings is greyed out) and looks awful, and there are blank areas top and bottom. Even the computer guy tried and couldn't get it to work correctly. I also tried the Dell to the monitor with a VGA to DVI cable - but that was awful too. What are the chances that a HDMI to DVI connection (and keeping it purely digital) would work into the 1600X1200? There is no real way of knowing in advance if the settings would recognise or allow 1600X1200.

Linux might be great, but my brain is now fried and I just can't take another option now.

Going off on a tangent, I'm thrilled to see the return of World Rally on ITV4 (shown tonight, and even more thrilled for the winner of Turkey. I don't know if the previous 4 were shown, but they are not on the ITVhub.

You can always buy an iMac and install windows alongside OSX. best (or worst depending on your point of view) of both worlds

I've rejected Linux desktops for that reason. I *hate* the look of applications falling off the bottom of the screen. It's not a thing that's intrinsically good or bad, but I have thirty years of muscle memory to deal with.

Neil