Advantages, Pro and Cons, etc.

[sycros]

I've been using XP for sometime now. And being a graphic designer, it really is not the best choice. I mean everything works fine, but it just works better in OS X (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).

 

So I've been considering an OSx86 install for a while now and it got me to thinking... Are there any big reasons to keep XP around at all? I have a few reasons myself but nothing really concrete enough to make me think I NEED to have XP.

 

RatDVD (great software, check it out) is only for XP.

BitTorrent I feel works better on XP.

And when I get my Sansa e260 4GB mp3 player, it'll "need" WMP.

 

So nothing big, just some things that would make my life easier.

SO PEOPLE... What are some of the "real" advantages and pros and cons to dual boot or completely SWITCHING OVER?

 

And just to avoid certain responses, I have used OS X and seen all of the new commercials. I know the advantages and pro and cons of the interfaces themselves. I wanna know the advantages and pros and cons to dual boot or reasons to completely eliminate XP.

[Ophiel X]

how can we answer whether or not it's important for you to keep XP around? that's probably a question best answered by you. personally i dual boot because i develop apps in Visual Studio 2005 and like to play games, a couple things best left to the XP realm.

 

also, i don't think my computer is actually high-end enough to consider using osx as my primary OS. it is however very convenient to be able to use it when i need to.

 

there's no con at all to dual booting and it's very easy. i highly recommend it. i find that acronis os selector is about the easiest way to dual boot.

 

another possibility is running osx as a VM. to do anything useful you'll need a very nice pc (i personally would want 1.5+gb of ram before i considered running a VM of osx instead of natively)

 

i also think it makes more sense to run osx as a VM inside of XP rather than vice versa. mostly because the overhead of xp can be tweaked to be significantly smaller than that of osx, thus leaving more resources available to the VM.

 

xp only:

cons - too many to list, but let's just say security for now

pros - you have a fast os and the most popular os which means finding quality free software is easy, you have friendly support staff in India when something breaks

 

osx only:

cons - you don't have many games to choose from, os is a bit less 'snappy', you may have partial or non-existent support for a particular piece of pc hardware

pros - rock solid stability, unsurpassed security, unique software only available for your OS, ability to directly compile and run many *nix apps

 

dual boot:

cons - none, you have the best of both worlds

pros - too many to list

[deim]

hi, i'm a design student and i use both..

 

as it was said on the post above you realy dont have much to lose if you install both OS (like i do)

 

what do you have to gain as a designer? well..at the moment i think nothing. photoshop is not unibin so is slower, as illustrator and so on (adobe products)...

 

mid april with photoshop cs3 i think osx will be great...almost virus free and very stabel...you can work, you can websurf..and if you dont mess it up it wont fail ( i hope). like ther's no need for antivirus nor antispy your pc equipment could in theory work better.

 

can you realy switch? i think i'll keep xp installed...that i know that will work...

 

but for a graphic designer, if you have a free afternoon, you have to try installing it

[Rammjet]

I keep a virtual machine of XP in Parallels in OSX to provide 99% of the things I need XP for. I still have a native install of XP for the other 1%

[gotoh]

Graphic desing apps Like Adobe CS are not universal binaries yet, which means the version you can use in OS X intel will run through ROSETTA and be much slower (even if they run fine) than running in XP... So unless you plan to upgrade to CS3 for OS X/intel when it is out, CS1 or CS2 will be pretty slow running trhough ROSETTA. Currently, running CS1 with ROSETTA in my Athlon X2 setup is not faster than running it in 1Ghz G4.

OS X / intel won't be a good option until every pro softwares like Adobe CS or XPress run in universal binaries (or intel only)

 

When all the software you use can run in OS X without ROSETTA, or at least the bigger ones (like CS3) then you can consider keeping a very little XP partition, which you will probably barely use.

BTW, bittorrent works fine in OS X... Just try other clients like transmission or tomatorrent. I use transmission, and even if it does not have all the options you could find in µtorrent for windows, downloads rate seem to be good...

[tidalpassion]

You didn't say which torrent program you tried and which version, or what your issues were, but I've found the Azureus bittorrent program on OS X to be really excellent. It's very stable, perfomance is great, and it is loaded with powerful useful features and expandable with many plugins (many included by default). If you dual or triple boot your machine, it also works very well under Ubuntu Linux although the Mac version seems more polished. To reduce seeking wear (and noise) with the hard drive, I did turn the Azureus cache up to 20 meg or so.

OS X really flies on a core 2 duo with a fast SATA drive and plenty of memory. For grins I've set up the BOINC client (host program to seti @ home and other distributed computing projects) and in 6 weeks or so my machine is in the top 10% for total contribution (some people have been crunching for years and some use multiple computers so that says a lot), and its in the top 1% for recent average output of daily work. OS X makes much better use of multiple cores than windows (and 4-core chips are available now too).

 

That ".mp3" player doesn't look as bad as most of the iPod alternatives, but it's not worth locking yourself into .wmp (DRM'd WMV) over. A friend was given one (he would have never bought it himself) and is having trouble with the mechanical scroll wheel. If you must have that player, you can still load it with .mp3's or unprotected .wmv files, both of which also work fine on an iPod and probably both can be loaded from Mac OS X and Linux. If the player isn't supported on other OSes, that alone is reason enough to avoid it. (Apple doesn't have iTunes software for the iPod on Linux, but there are open-source programs that work great).

Anyway, I'd suggest not getting married to a proprietary MS WMP format. They may try to shove it down peoples throats as plays for sure, but they don't even support it on their own Zune player. Don't drink the cool-aide, it's addictive poison!!!!

If you feel addicted to WMP consider getting therapy.

 

If you're willing to run an unlicensed copy of OS X it surprises me you'd feel compelled to pay for MS-branded DRM'd music. At least the DRM'd AAC music from the iTunes store allows burning to audio CD (a good idea for backup anyway) and from there it can always be reripped with whatever you like. I'm impressed with the speed with which iTunes rips from audio CD to unprotected AAC on my core 2 duo. Some of my commercial music CDs ripped in less than two minutes (some were less than the maximum 74 or 80 minutes of course), other in little more than that. The limiting speed was the optical drive, with the later tracks ripping faster since there is more data per revolution as one gets towards the end (outside) of the disc.

 

I see a lot of older PCs on the curb, in the trash, at thrift stores for $5 or so, and at recycling centers. Many of the Pentium III and AMD machines are actually fast enough for many things, they're usually just heavily infected. You could always run OS X on your nice hardware, and run windows (or better yet Ubuntu Linux) on an old PC.

 

Cons? These should be obvious. The value of a machine thrown together to run OS X is less than a comparable "real" Mac because it isn't properly licensed, is more trouble to get and keep working, doing what would be simple system updates carries considerable risk of complication, and it probably will have a shorter life in terms of its ability to run future versions of OS X. Something trivial on a real Mac, like booting from a CD to do disk repairs with Disk Warrior, doesn't work. One should have another hard drive online with a working system to do maintenance from. There are little quirks, some of which may not be so little to someone that needs a particular feature. For instance my iSight camera doesn't work (Firewire). I've read that sharing the net connection through the Firewire port doesn't either. That may seem unimportant but with the Macs ability to share tasks like video compression between multiple computers (Visual Hub using Xgrid) the ability to move huge files really fast is important. Not everyone has routers that can handle gigabit ethernet. The patches to get sound out working broke things. The profiler shows missing dependencies, and my external USB audio in/out device no longer works. A real Mac avoids most of the hassles.

 

Pros? I think of my machine as a fun useful experiment. It's made a great HDTV system (recording off-air HDTV with Eye-TV via USB 2) and a much simpler PVR than either Windows or Linux solutions. And it had room for a bunch of hard drives internally. (400 gig was 3/4 full in 2 weeks of saving some TV shows!) I still drool over the beauty of a 24" iMac from Apple, and it's built in screen that can do 1080i HDTV (1920*1080 pixels) in full quality. Very few PCs or even plasma TVs can do that, and it can record too! Allowing $1000 for a screen as good as the iMacs, my "PC" is only about $400 cheaper, so the cost savings is really very little considering the hassles and shorter useful might-be-sorta-supported life. But it is fun, I've learned a great deal, and get to do things like overclock (the Imac has a mobil chip instead of the desktop version, so buss speeds are lower and there just isn't enough cooling for overclocking even if one knew how). Many people seem to be running OS X on some unexciting hardware (understandable if its already there...), but to really appreciate it a system built on carefully chosen new parts flies in comparison. I went with a cheaper motherboard having onboard video. The cons are far less overclockability (945 compared to 975 MCH chip limits), but the board was $200 cheaper and the onboard video does everything I need while saving greatly on power consumption. Includining HDTV tuner but not monitor the system takes about 95 Watts. (Figure about $1 per month per every 10 Watts that's used 24 hours a day). Older CPUs, especially overclocked, and high-end video cards would have more than doubled power use. Over a year the Core 2 Duo pays for the added cost over a pentium-d in electricity savings. Anyone that has ever had the urge to image video DVDs from .AVI movies will appreciate the added power of the new CPUs. There's no real savings in using and old Pentium-D or earlier. (If you have one I'd suggest selling it before everyone realizes the difference)

[nastyhome]

I've been using XP for sometime now. And being a graphic designer, it really is not the best choice. I mean everything works fine, but it just works better in OS X (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).

 

So I've been considering an OSx86 install for a while now and it got me to thinking... Are there any big reasons to keep XP around at all? I have a few reasons myself but nothing really concrete enough to make me think I NEED to have XP.

 

RatDVD (great software, check it out) is only for XP.

BitTorrent I feel works better on XP.

And when I get my Sansa e260 4GB mp3 player, it'll "need" WMP.

 

So nothing big, just some things that would make my life easier.

SO PEOPLE... What are some of the "real" advantages and pros and cons to dual boot or completely SWITCHING OVER?

 

And just to avoid certain responses, I have used OS X and seen all of the new commercials. I know the advantages and pro and cons of the interfaces themselves. I wanna know the advantages and pros and cons to dual boot or reasons to completely eliminate XP.

 

why dont you give OS X a try!

 

Its like trying to find out what is your sexual fantasy.

 

XP is good for one thing, and OS X is good for another thing.

 

And that is the truth.

 

It just depends on what you use it on, what you do it with, or whatever blows your skirt.

 

I love my XP\Vista, because i get to play my games, watch movies and do whatever I want.

 

Whereas my OS X, I get to explore a new world, get to play with the programs and the OS itself. I might try Photoshop on it, or use it for my daily task.

 

You dont have to totally get away from XP!

 

Theres always DUAL BOOT!

 

It wont hurt to have to switch between OS's.

 

To be frank, I would not recommend you completely switch over to OS X on your XP machine and rather buy a real Mac machine running OS X.

 

You will see the benefits on a Mac machine opposed to the x86 version.

[sycros]

If you feel addicted to WMP consider getting therapy.

 

 

I'm not addicted to WMP, I just want the Sansa mp3 player. I like the player more than the iPod. Man, you went a long time about those WMA files... You can use mp3s on the Sansa players...