New OS for the MacBook Pro

[jeffhorrigan]

I like Microsoft's Security Essentials for virus and spyware protection on Windows. It's free, unobtrusive and just works. http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-se ... tials.aspx

[Reeltarded]

It does!

[vibratoking]

Malwarebytes is useful. I've had viruses with AVG and Avast. Avast is nagware to the max. Norton is much less obtrusive that Avast.

[Phil_S]

Instead of running Windows in a separate partition, have you looked at VMware and Parallels? These are Windows emulators. I hear they work very well.

[skyboltone]

Instead of running Windows in a separate partition, have you looked at VMware and Parallels? These are Windows emulators. I hear they work very well.

I need to do that. It looks interesting.

[Structo]

Ever since "upgrading" to Mavericks, my system has been an unstable, horrible, nightmarish mess. Random shutdowns and mysterious reboots. Pages now takes 30+ seconds to start up; and saving files sometimes locks up the entire computer requiring a hard reboot. Audio interface incompatible, requiring a replacement. Built-in optical drive ceased functioning. Worst version of OSX ever. Awful.

Hey, I can't resist.
Probably from my experience at The Gear Page but, BUY A PC!

That seems to be the mantra from TGP when a PC user has problems. (buy a Mac)

Me?
I use a PC that still has Win XP SP3.

The way I feel about the PC vs Mac war is this,
People that buy Mac's are like people that trust there car mechanic.
Those of us that work on our own PC's are like the do it yourselfers.
You can easily replace components without all the propriety BS and can buy easily the parts to repair the PC>
Used to keep up about six months behind state of the art components when I gamed.

Now my ancient tower is about 8 years old.

Hey, I don't even know how to turn Mac on. (there is a joke there somewhere).
My sister has a Mac, unfortunately she lives in Utah.
But she is always having problems.

Anyway, regardless how I feel about a Mac, good luck.

[skyboltone]

Well Tom, let me put it like this. You know how you always feel just a little smarter after drinking a few beers? Well that's the way moving up to Mac makes you feel.

[Phil_S]

Instead of running Windows in a separate partition, have you looked at VMware and Parallels? These are Windows emulators. I hear they work very well.

I need to do that. It looks interesting.

It gets even better than you might imagine. You can mount PC software to run in the virtual Windows and you can, from virtual Windows "see" the Mac as another device, server, or storage. IMO, it gives you the best of both worlds and because you can have both open at the same time, you don't have to choose. Better yet, for example, you can create a Word document on your PC emulation (if you have the software), save it and close PC Word. You can immediately grab that document with Word for Mac and continue to work on it "on the other side." You get the idea, I think. These are cheap, reliable, and proven. I think they represent very little risk and you can probably try them for 30 days for free.

[rp]

Instead of running Windows in a separate partition, have you looked at VMware and Parallels? These are Windows emulators. I hear they work very well.

I need to do that. It looks interesting.

It gets even better than you might imagine. You can mount PC software to run in the virtual Windows and you can, from virtual Windows "see" the Mac as another device, server, or storage. IMO, it gives you the best of both worlds and because you can have both open at the same time, you don't have to choose. Better yet, for example, you can create a Word document on your PC emulation (if you have the software), save it and close PC Word. You can immediately grab that document with Word for Mac and continue to work on it "on the other side." You get the idea, I think. These are cheap, reliable, and proven. I think they represent very little risk and you can probably try them for 30 days for free.

+1 on all the above. Parallels is very proven, very reliable. Best and most amazing is your windows stuff is all 100% in a Windows folder in the Parallels folder. So you can just trash the one folder if you ever want and completely clear your machine of the windows stuff. For a while I was running OSX Ubuntu and Win7 all at the same time all smoothly. Kind of fun. Some people think macs are still toys, they are very powerful unix based machine with lots of options and lots of hidden funtions behind the pretty consumer gui, which itself is pretty powerful. A SA could do more with a mac than PC IMO, but most companies won't dish out for it which is why you never see then used as such and people think they are just for artists and musicians, or hipster show offs. I did a lot of work for silly rich Wall Streeters and in their homes and all those hedge fund guys are all on macs. We're a long way from 1998.

[Jana]

Ah, the mac versus pc debate--I'll bite.

I have used computers since the punch card days. My first computer was an 8 bit machine that used CPM. Then came Dos--which was very similar to CPM except all the commands on the command line were backwards. I used Dos since the day it came out and eventually used windows all the way to XP. I skipped Vista and stayed with XP (which I think is the best OS MS has ever had). About 5 years ago I switched to Macs. It took me a while to get used to OS X but now that I have, I can't imagine going back to Windows.

I do have concerns though about where OS X is headed. 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) is, in my opinion, the best OS ever. It is fast and reliable. Lion and Mountain Lion (the two successors to Snow Leopard for you windows people) are Apple's version of Vista--bloated, slow, and tries to add features in that just aren't needed. Mavericks shows some promise (I have it installed on a partition to try it out) but it isn't there yet.

I used to hate Apple and OS X. But, I gave it a fair chance and really made an effort to understand the reasons why it does the things it does (like, what the green, yellow, red dots do instead of why they don't work exactly like Windows--maximize, minimize, quit).

End Rant.

[rp]

I do have concerns though about where OS X is headed. 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) is, in my opinion, the best OS ever. It is fast and reliable. Lion and Mountain Lion (the two successors to Snow Leopard for you windows people) are Apple's version of Vista--bloated, slow, and tries to add features in that just aren't needed. Mavericks shows some promise (I have it installed on a partition to try it out) but it isn't there yet.

Apple dug itself into a hole since the iphone (though an insanely profitable one that saved it) and now it has to maintain the respect of its serious (and hypercritical) power users while at the same time accommodating all the kids and mindless consumers on iphones and ipads. The other day my friend's mom, who's had an iphone for 3 years now, asked me what IOS (eeos as she put it) is. Yikes. So now apple has to integrate the casual user and the power users, something that in the past it could balance easy as they had an exclusively savvy user group, this was the main reason their os was better - better market to sell in. Catering to high and low has always been one of the big problems of windows. Apple now needs to integrate and grow all this social networking, cloud, and mobile crap I couldn't care about into their OS. I'll see where it goes in the next 2 years. Windows has the exact same issue but Apple still has much better developers and more creative insight so I'm hoping for the best. But I wonder without Jobs there to go ballistic and scare people if they'll continue to keep it simple.

[jestaudio]

I do have concerns though about where OS X is headed. 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) is, in my opinion, the best OS ever. It is fast and reliable. Lion and Mountain Lion (the two successors to Snow Leopard for you windows people) are Apple's version of Vista--bloated, slow, and tries to add features in that just aren't needed. Mavericks shows some promise (I have it installed on a partition to try it out) but it isn't there yet.

Apple dug itself into a hole since the iphone (though an insanely profitable one that saved it) and now it has to maintain the respect of its serious (and hypercritical) power users while at the same time accommodating all the kids and mindless consumers on iphones and ipads. The other day my friend's mom, who's had an iphone for 3 years now, asked me what IOS (eeos as she put it) is. Yikes. So now apple has to integrate the casual user and the power users, something that in the past it could balance easy as they had an exclusively savvy user group, this was the main reason their os was better - better market to sell in. Catering to high and low has always been one of the big problems of windows. Apple now needs to integrate and grow all this social networking, cloud, and mobile crap I couldn't care about into their OS. I'll see where it goes in the next 2 years. Windows has the exact same issue but Apple still has much better developers and more creative insight so I'm hoping for the best. But I wonder without Jobs there to go ballistic and scare people if they'll continue to keep it simple.

Never owned a I phone and never will, nothing to do with the company , just never needed the features etc, android does quite nicely at a 1/4 of the cost per month, same with a mac book, stupidly expensive in the UK in comparison to a pc especially if you can build it yourself, I have a dual boot win7/xp machine that runs my studio just fine