What brand computer should i get?

[FutureChickenMan]

Quote:
Macs are great. Stylish equipment, rock solid operating system, intuitive interface. BUT, they are expensive, they don't use standard PC components so they are hard to upgrade, and you pretty much have to stick to the standard office and multimedia software. As a tinkerer and amateur radio operator, I use a lot of specialized software for programming microcontrollers, radio control, contact logging, etc. There's a ton of stuff written for Windows, but it's slim pickings for the Mac. I've heard their OS emulation software has come a long way, but haven't tried it. Anybody out there running Windows emulation on a Mac? How well does it work with USB and serial devices?

yeah you can emulate windows on macs now (becuase of their linux OS). Or you can buy a Mac and load windows on it since they're running Intel architechture now. You can emulate windows on linux. And you can emulate windows on windows, linux on windows etc etc etc.

But it's a giant pain in the butt. So, as you said, buy a mac and look cool. But who wants a cool looking paperweight.

Is windows the greatest thing since sliced bread? Heck no, but you can run dang near anything on it, find that dang near anything everywhere and get parts upgrades all over the planet with no trouble at all. And all this at half the price of a mac.

Apples greatest move was the Mac SE.

Since then they've been searching for the holy grail of gaining ground on M$/PC's and it just hasn't happened. They're still trying and trying by pumping the schools full of macs for our kids to learn on then.... when they get in the real world... not too many macs out there in the business world. There's a few, but not much. Perhaps the move to the linux OS will be their holy grail, but considering linux has been around for a long time and really hasn't gained much ground (at least in the US) since it became dummed down, I don't expect much to change for a long time. For mac to gain anymore ground than it has, M$ has to make a collosal screw up, and some are calling it Vista. But they said the same thing about Windows 2000 and XP.

Time will tell.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

My first computer was a Mac SE with 20 MB hard drive and 256k of RAM... Great little machine. My next computer was a Compaq 486 running Windows 3.1. I was very disappointed with Windows. My little Mac would multitask all day long. Trying to run two programs at once on 3.1 was an exercise in futility...

 

[FutureChickenMan]

Quote:
Windows 3.1 = giant batch file. The result of M$ panicing when they got a look at "lisa".

I used the Mac SE a lot in highschool for doing all my reports and junk. Ironically, "computer class" was filled with IBM XT's.

Lucky for me, my parents we're some how smitten with wisdom way back when and bought us kids a Tandy TRS-80 on a whim one day at the mall. I think I was aboug 8 or 9 when we got that. From there, I took computer class in middle school working on Apple II c/e's. Then high school the Mac SE/30 and IBM AT's and XT's. At home we upgraded to the IBM PS2/25. A few years later, another Tandy this time the MPC-10 (I think) it had a 486sx and 4mb of RAM (the first computer I bought and paid for myself). From then on I've had a multitude of machines, mostly ones I've built myself with some HP's, Dell's, Sharp, Acer thrown in. The highest number of PC's I've had at one time in my home was 14; all networked and running various operating systems. That was when I was in college working on my B.S. Right now I have 3 dell desktops, 1 hp laptop, 1 sharp laptop and two machines I built myself and enough parts to build 2 or 3 more.

I dunno, computers can be just as addictive and expensive as chickens. lol