Can of Worms Now Open: Mac vs. PC

[Gamma-UT]

These days, there is far less need to reinstall Windows. On Windows, you have system restore points and drive cloning. Mac has Time Machine and SuperDuper or Carbon Copy. It's the same deal pretty much. People who keep reinstalling tend IME to be a bit "accident prone". If you're messing with the system, tuning stuff all the time, things will go wrong and they will go wrong in the registry, which is hard to clean up manually but is highly amenable to being wiped clean so you can start again. But, as I say, maintain a known good clone of the system drive (and it's the same for a Mac), you should be fine.

I personally find it harder to clean up a PC than a Mac these days, but that's more down to familiarity than anything. The two OSs pretty much have analogous functions no matter what you're trying to do.

[EvilDragon]

I didn't have to reinstall W7 in over 2 years I have them running on both my systems. Don't worry.

[robogone]

The 'extended support' was indeed, erm, extended, but that's specific to business customers, (more specifically very large businesses with vast numbers of macbines and hence lots of legacy issues). As far as us normal punters go, we've had the benefit of updates on the back of that, but Vista wasnt really part of the equation as much as legacy issues.

I can confirm that - I work for a company with more than a quarter of a million employees, and Vista was completely skipped - on Monday I got a new laptop as the lease finally expired and for the first time I have Windows 7 instead of XP.

We're still in the position that most people have XP rather than Windows 7 (Windows 8 is still being analyzed to determine if it will become a core technology, so it's out of bounds right now). The main reason for skipping Vista was that it simply didn't allow for the running of legacy software and hardware with anything like 100% success, so the decision was made that policy would prohibit it from being installed on our machines. We need at least some kind of support of XP for a while yet, and I can't imagine that MS would not be cognizant of how many live XP licenses we (and other companies in the same position) have.

[4damind]

Re-installing is a bit 10 years back. I think it's started with XP or Win2000 based on NT that all was a lot more stable.
This is only necessary to have a completely clean system for testing purposes etc. Win8 has this resetting feature with different options and for people using backup applications like TrueImage, they all have a restore option and a boot image and stuff.. so also if the complete computer is broken, the last backup can be easy restored to a new disk, another disk etc.

[Dewdman42]

These days, there is far less need to reinstall Windows. On Windows, you have system restore points and drive cloning. Mac has Time Machine and SuperDuper or Carbon Copy. It's the same deal pretty much. People who keep reinstalling tend IME to be a bit "accident prone". If you're messing with the system, tuning stuff all the time, things will go wrong and they will go wrong in the registry, which is hard to clean up manually but is highly amenable to being wiped clean so you can start again. But, as I say, maintain a known good clone of the system drive (and it's the same for a Mac), you should be fine.

I personally find it harder to clean up a PC than a Mac these days, but that's more down to familiarity than anything. The two OSs pretty much have analogous functions no matter what you're trying to do.

Yes there are ghosting options on either platform and that is exactly what I used to do with XP, I would restore an old ghost image every year. But the question, why did I have to? Because Windows would start to slow down over time and the registry would be out of control. I agree, using drive cloning is the best way to handle it on windows. Whenever I install windows on a new machine I do the install, I get all the updates from MS and a few little basic configurations and things I always want there, and then I immediately clone it in that state. Next time I'll never have to reinstall windows on that machine again, I can start from there. I also always partition my HD so that the boot partition doesn't have any critical data. I even configure it so that MyDocuments is on the other partition. I make sure that mail and everything is on the other drive. That way I can restore a clone and be up and running again pretty quickly.

However, that problem simply does not exist on OSX. My macs never need to be rebooted or restored or anything they just tick along very reliably... They are unix and that is a huge part of the reason why. At most you might have to go delete a pref file here or there occasionally, but its not like its trapped inside a huge registry database that is almost impossible to understand. And honestly I can count on one hand the number of times I had to delete a preference file.

Its really hard to get a virus on OSX mainly because you can't install much of anything without being prompted for your password. So its gonna be very difficult for anything to get on there. Unix is simply more secure. Windows has back doors all over the place and they are constantly plugging the holes.

OSX does not require HD defragging, its automatically managed by the OS.

OSX has unix shell scripting and so many commands available to create automated tasks. Python and everything else comes built in.

OSX has Spaces! This feature alone I can hardly imagine to live without. I don't know maybe Windows8 has that now?

Related to audio and midi, its important to take notice of the fact that CoreAudio and CoreMIdi are both built into the operating system. CoreMidi includes interapplication midi, even over a network, midi timestamping, etc. Basically, Apple reallly took the music and video crowd seriously when they developed their api's. My impression is that Microsoft has perhaps taken the gaming industry seriously and media playback, but not necessarily audio production as mostly you have to rely on Steinberg's AISO to do pro audio. Thankfully, that is a pretty solid system and most all hardware companies are following it, so we're good enough for now, but midi is not covered by anyone at all like it is built into OSX and really MS has offloaded responsibility to a third party vendor...which sooner or later will come back to bite.

We could go on and on about all the cool things I discovered where it was like xmas morning to find out OSX had it covered already.

On the flip side, Apple's Finder pretty much sucks. A lot of people don't like that the menu bar is at the top of the screen rather than at the top of every app window like it is on windows. A friend of mine had a lot of problems a few years back trying to integrate with his job that was using Outlook and exchange server. Things have improved in that area since then. Some people don't like the way real estate is used on the mac screen even though its pretty and eye candy that MS is trying to copy perhaps its not efficiently using space in some ways. I hate the fact that the only way to resize the windows is the bottom right corner to drag, while on windows you can resize from any side pretty much. Little things like that. Apple tries to make their stuff dummy proof, but this often makes it less powerful for power users, in my estimation.

I used to have a pet peeve about Apple Mail, but I improved mine with a few third party plugins and now I love it. Its not outlook but it works fine. I don't like what they did to it in Lion and ML though, which is one reason I'm still on 10.6.

Anyway most people that seem to be against mac seem to be against it for little things like I have mentioned, things in the finder that are cumbersome for the sake of simplicity. You get used to it and find ways to work, then its not so bad. They also don't like the price for hardware. But make no mistake, OSX does run more reliably in the long run then Windows and once you learn your way around I find it much easier to troubleshoot. I didn't at first.

[aMUSEd]

OSX has Spaces! This feature alone I can hardly imagine to live without. I don't know maybe Windows8 has that now?

I've been on OS-X for a year now and never heard of them? What is this?

[robogone]

OSX has Spaces! This feature alone I can hardly imagine to live without. I don't know maybe Windows8 has that now?

I've been on OS-X for a year now and never heard of them? What is this?

Virtual desktops - it's been around in various Unix operating systems for a long time. Essentially you have multiple desktops that you can switch between to keep your work organized.

[Dewdman42]

Seriously? Well which version of OSX are you on? Supposedly they dummied down the feature on Lion and ML and I'm not sure where its at now or how to use it on those platforms. but on 10.6 you go into system preferences and look in the section about "Expose and Spaces". Then you can create multiple virtual desktops and flip between them using key commands or other ways.

So I keep my email always running on one virtual desktop and then I can page over to another screen for iCal and Things, another virtual desktop for DP8, etc. When I launch parallels it goes to its own virtual desktop, etc.. If you have a screen full of open windows but need to get to a clean desktop to find a file you left there, fine, switch to screen number 3 and there is a clean desktop, etc..

I think the feature is on Lion and ML too, but they took away the ability to create X number of desktops always open, I like mine with 6 desktops always and I have certain apps configured to always open in desktop #n. In Lion they tried to make it simpler, it automatically creates virtual desktops in some way but took away some of my ability to control it. I dunno, I'm still on 10.6 and not leaving anytime soon.

[Ashe37]

OSX does not require HD defragging, its automatically managed by the OS.
.

OSX manages the file writing to prevent files from getting fragmented. It does not prevent fragmentation of *free space* on the drive, just fragmentation of *files*. Video editors (a lot of OSX users are video editors) should defragment their hard drives regularly in order to optimize the amount of free space they have, otherwise they may experience some limitations on their performance (primarily, how large of a video file they can capture from something like tape.)

[Dewdman42]

That makes sense. Managing free space means moving files around. what do you reccomend for defragging free space on mac?

Some might say the best way is to occasionally do a backup/restore using super duper.

[Ashe37]

I don't know what is good currently, the last time i dealt with editing systems was 2008.

[Xenobt]

I use Diskwarrior to defrag my drives after I do back-ups, and have never had a problem. Don't know if it will work with Intel macs, but it's my go to for now. And I DO see a slight performance increase and less spinning beachballs with high track counts or dense dialog edits.

And dewdman42, your lengthy (god bless ya!) post about the core user group for both systems seems to play out in the real studio world. I rarely see PCs in the big rooms, only at reception! And you're right, our IT guy says the best defrag solution is a wipe and reinstall from time machine.

I'm leaning toward biting the bullet and going for an imac at home, and let the unknown remain that way. I guess I've got a little "grass is greener" in me now, and the road not taken looks better than the more expensive, but well trod path.

But this will be a 5 year choice, if my current system is an indicator, and it seems the newer mac OS' are stranding VIs and plugs too, so it may be six of one...

How many cliches in this post?!

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

[Dewdman42]

Just for kicks I just bought iDefrag and I'm running it now. Interestingly it decided that my boot drive was too fragmented to do a full defrag without booting from another drive. So clearly there is some level of fragmentation that still gets into OSX filesystem. After reading some more it became apparent that OSX only ensures that files under 20MB are not fragmented. larger files will be fragmented. These days, 20MB is not much, I have a lot of critical files over 20MB without question.

So I'm gonna run iDefrag occasionally..... Supposedly its smart enough to know how to move certain kinds of system files to the faster part of the drive too.

Xenobt, you might also consider a refurbished mac. You can get an 8 core 2009 mac for quite reasonable right now and I believe that might out perform an iMac, even a new one....and has more slots and ports for audio work if you desire.

[Xenobt]

Thanks for the suggestion, DM, I'm looking into all sorts of Mac options now, even the Mini Server edition, but I'd still like all the firewire, usb and a superdrive for burning cds/dvds and installing older software.

FYi about the defrag thing, our Mac IT guru Eric says that recent versions of OSX shouldn't need to defrag, but once you reach 80% of your drive space, it's not a sure thing. So the dump off, reformat and restore is still best for that.

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

[aMUSEd]

OSX has Spaces! This feature alone I can hardly imagine to live without. I don't know maybe Windows8 has that now?

I've been on OS-X for a year now and never heard of them? What is this?

Virtual desktops - it's been around in various Unix operating systems for a long time. Essentially you have multiple desktops that you can switch between to keep your work organized.

Oh is that all? Yes that's basic stuff, I thought all OSes had them these days?