April 21, 2008
Popular Mechanics only has eyes for Macs
Posted Apr. 21, ’08, 5:33 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware
Popular Mechanics has penned a piece comparing Macs and PCs. They said it couldn’t be done. They said it wouldn’t be done. They ignored… them. Anyway, it turns out that Popular Mechanics loves them some Macs.
In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.
While the improved Vista performance is a nice perk, let’s look at what they’re really saying. Vista is a hog. Have they stuffed some good stuff into Vista? Sure. Microsoft has put a lot of work into security, which is very positive for the average end user. Poor performance is the reason most people are shying away from the OS. It’s primetime for Macs.
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Vista is a hog and I hated having to install it on my mac (with Parallels). But I need it to run Quicken for Windows.
I'd love to have only the bare minimum Windows files to run programs like this, but there is no option for "custom install" Vista that would allow one to select just the features one wants. For example, I don't need Windows DVD burner, parental controls, contacts, music and pictures files, media manager functions, etc. I will use my Mac OS for all that.
Any good articles/instructions out there of how to safely accomplish this without messing up the functionality of Vista?
There's a quick and relatively painless (that's in the Windows sense of the word) workaround for Vista bloatware. It's called Windows XP. Windows 2000 is another GREAT alternative (I still use Quicken/Win too). After 10 years in Windows-land, I was faced with the Vista-or-OSX upgrade choice last June. But hey, after the ARDUOUS process of slipstreaming my XP Pro SP1 disk to SP2, it came in VERY handy for Boot Camp/Parallels, and I went all-out and made a LightScribe CD for the SP2 slipstream with a the smarmiest photo of Bill Gates I could find. Seriously, XP runs GREAT, and if you don't need Boot Camp functionality, Win2000 is a cheap, extremely compact, and highly underrated Win OS.