Re: XP Professional: Not as bad as I expected, but still VERY primitive
- From: Paweł Wójciak <"do not spam me"@somwhere.pl>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:36:53 +0200
George Graves napisał(a):
After a week of using XP Pro at my newest client's place of business, I have to be honest and say that I was wrong. XP is nowhere near as unusable as my previous brief encounters with it had led me to believe. It is, in fact, very usable. It is also, compared to OSX, very primitive. There are too many steps to go through to get at most things, there are way to many "nannies" in the form of warning boxes, unnnecessary (and unwanted, I might add) pop-ups and dialogs and seemingly there's a "Wizard" for everything. I realize that this is the way that Windows matured, but honestly, isn't it time for MS to take another tack?
Things like screen capture (needed to write product mamuals) are low resolution and look terrible compared to those from the Mac. Not only that but XP doesn't seem to offer the screen capture options (like drag -and-capture) that the Mac offers. When making PDFs, XP can't handle PostScript in PDFs without Acrobat Distiller and a PostScript printer driver. (third party solutions like CutePDF or PDF995 while offering a fast print-to-PDF solution, do not parse placed PS images at all).
I also find networking STILL unnecessirily complex and hard to set-up. There is a seemingly endless merry-go-round of set-up windows which if followed take you round and round and round the same set of windows over and over. I kept hoping that one of them would yield a brass ring, but no such luck. Sure, I have everything working, and XP switches seamlessly between my home Wi-Fi network and the office Ethernet network which I found surprising and of course, very good. I've already said that SAMBA on XP Pro works marvelously, and I have no complaints there. I can talk to the other computers on my home network without a hitch.
The Dell Latitude D510 seems to have a 1.5 Gig Celeron M in it (if I am to believe Dell's website - and I have no reason not to) yet it seems sluggish compared to my 1 Gig G4 PowerBook and definitly slow nest to me G5 tower. It boots slower also, taking close to two minutes to reach desktop, vs less than a minute for my PowerBook and only about 30 seconds for my G5. BUT, I love the keyboard on the Dell - APPLE are you listening? While the Dell is reasonably well built, it is definitely cheaper looking than my PowerBook. I've already mentioned the track pad which is no better than any other I've tried, but I'm impressed with the Latitude's I/O. It has Firewire (albeit via the little tiny camcorder connector), FOUR USB ports. Microphone, headphone, built-in modem, buit-in Ether, Parallel and serial ports as well as VGA and S-Video. It comes with a PCMCIA slot (and a Wi-Fi card in that slot) as well as IR and a DVD burner. Very impressive. If I could put OSX on it, it would be an almost perfect laptop (might run faster too).
Just my two cents and an apology to the Windows users here for many of my comments about Windows. I still think OSX is MUCH better, but XP is hardly the garbage that Win98/SE/ME/W2K was or that I thought XP to still be.
Good post. Good approach.
As I said in one of my first posts here about a month ago, I'm doing some work on Mac Mini, and as a DOS/Windows user for many years I must say I like OSX more and more. The greatest features so far for me are expose and spotlight. When you have 10-15 windows open (text files, safari, ide...) expose is really convinient. And for a beginnig OSX user, not accustomed to directory structure the spotlight speeds up things too.
OTOH I see flaws too... For example, GarageBand just doesn't work. I don't know why... I tried to google for answer, found two hints, didn't help. Just hangs when I try to create new song. I wish I had time to try harder, but I don't. Maybe someone here could help me? I know it's NTG but maybe it's something obvious for you.
The other thing is speed. You really can't compare Celeron to G4 or G5, based on processor speed. I suppose 1.2 G4 is 2.0-2.5 Celeron. And, addressing the start-up times, yes, OSX is faster than XP, but the apps running aren't.
If the price difference wasn't as large beetween PC (which I can assemble myself) and Mac - more than 300% (I'm talking about iMac here in Poland), I don't think I would hesistate switching (especially with the Intel processor, as I have to run some Windows stuff unavailable for Mac).
Pablo
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- XP Professional: Not as bad as I expected, but still VERY primitive
- From: George Graves
- XP Professional: Not as bad as I expected, but still VERY primitive
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