Mac or PC which do you use?

programming on anything *nix based is heavenly :nod:

 

I´m on a 2008 Mac Pro, nice machine BTW.

 

I moved away from Windows XP just ahead of Vista coming out, and have dabbled with it from time to time when assisting my daughter do things on her laptop.

Anyway, I had an HDD to format into NTFS for someone and thought "easy, I'll just fire up my daughter's Vista laptop and do it using an external enclosure".

Wow....

So, formatting a hard drive has changed for the worse. I had to "initialize" and do all sorts of stuff before it was ready to proceed. What happened to "Format" off "My Computer"?

 

I use Windows 7 because it was "free" (actually hidden in the cost of college tuition, but whatever the price is it's less than retail). So far - so good. Games run at a lower framerate than XP, but certain graphics driver issues I had with windows XP are now resolved.

Mac OS is nice from what I've seen, and a number of people I know use them with successfully for development and general hacking, so I'm considering them for next time. It's the hardware prices that bother me. There seems to be a high premium associated with having the Apple brand name on your machine.

Linux isn't read for prime-time as far as I'm concerned. Both of my PCs have major driver issues. My desktop has a fairly odd combination of motherboard (sapphire w/ AMD chipset) and graphics (nvidia-based, made by palit), so it's not surprising that linux absolutely fails to work no matter what the forums suggest (various boot options, different variations on the same nvidia drivers, etc.). But the laptop is a plain dell inspiron from '05, and it also has graphics problems.
Obviously, if I need anything more specialized (such as a quick thrown-together quake 3 server for a lan party) linux is the way to go.

 

Even when I was broke as fuck and used Microsoft products attained through less than legal channels I never considered them free as they sucked so much of time when they eventually broke into a million pieces.

 

Growing up the first computers I used were os7 machines followed by win 95, os8, os 9, win 98, xp. I didn't use os or os9 for a very long time ( I mean I ofcourse ran into it, but it was not what I used). Then at the beginning of this year I started using macs again and in that time bought/sold 3-4 macs and still have an old b&w g3 in my room. I quickly fell in love with the OS all over again using a g3 ibook for the better part of a week at work and an emac I had got for 50bucks at home. I then got a dual 1ghz g4 quick silver with matching 17" adc lcd. I have sold all this stuff now and now am using a p4 3.2ghz HT proc as a hackintosh it is decent, but not amazing spec wise it gets the job done though. That is my main desktop rig that I use, but I am getting the white intel 24" imac either for xmas or early next year (my dad is giving me his imac after he buys him self the new 27" imac). I will probably still dual screen even with a screen that big and I will most likely dual boot it with win7.

I use windows 7 on my laptop and I must say that I really like it, in fact, I had read that my laptop was decently compatible with being hackintoshed, but I just liked win7 so much that I decided against it. I also have an intel atom nettop running as a HTPC which is running xp (coreavc/other purposes). Over all I'd say that I like osx more, but that it is not much more and I really don't mind using windows or osx.

 

Anyone using an Intel based Mac should just change their vote to PC - Other OS