If you look at the Wikipedia list of PIMS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_information_managers it is clear that there are many more PIMs available for Windows than for the Mac.

But I have grown concerned that Microsoft may be dropping the ball on Windows. I need more horsepower than I currently have to run one particular music program (which will run on Windows or OS X). News reports today indicate that when Windows XP SP3 is released that it may speed up XP by 10%. And in the tests of one lab XP SP3 performed twice as fast as Vista on the same machine.

I suspect that the test machine didn't have enough RAM for Vista, but the point remains that Vista seems to suck up RAM that I need for other purposes. I have 3 Gigs installed with XP, and would try installing more, but the forum for the music program in question has indicated that XP wouldn't be able to address the extra memory.Vista doesn't seem to be any better, according to the forum.

When I look at the Mac site I see that I could purchase servers that can use quad processors, 64 and 32 bit processing, and ridiculous amounts of RAM. When I look at Windows servers I see messages like "not approved for home use."

So in addition to lusting after the certain programs like Scrivener (as recently discussed on the forum), I am starting to wonder if the Mac OS is starting to offer more powerful options.for one-man operations than Windows. I chose Windows in the first place because some people suggested that if you needed a truck then buy Windows, whereas a Mac was described as being more like a sports car.

I need a truck, and now I am beginning to wonder about the direction that Windows is going.. From reports so far, Vista is a step in the wrong direction relative to my needs. And I am stunned when I see the kind of power that OS X can address.

I love some of my Windows software, so at the moment I am waiting to see what happens in the next six months to a year.

Randall S

I wouldn't suggest shelling out for a new machine just because you're CRIMPing... there are plenty of good PIMs available for Windows. On the other hand, if you have to buy a new machine to replace an old one, it makes sense to consider OS X, since a move to Vista involves potentially as much disruption as a move to a new OS.

To be honest, if you're willing to run something like VMWare Fusion in OS X, which lets you choose the version of Windows you like (I keep XP around), you may find that moving to OS X is less of a hassle in terms of compatibility, both for devices and for really old applications. For instance, in order to get access to more memory, you have to run 64-bit Vista, but Ecco (my favorite Windows PIM) doesn't run at all on 64-bit Vista.

VMWare Fusion on the Mac lets you run your all Windows apps--including Ecco--in a mode where they behave exactly like OS X apps... they're not boxed in to a Windows "window", they appear on your dock in the same way a native app would, they appear when you press option-tab (the Mac equivalent to control-tab), you can spread them across virtual desktops, etc. And in terms of legacy printer support, Macs now have the edge over Vista. Legacy scanner support is however still better on Vista. (That said, you can use Windows drivers if necessary with your scanner in VMWare, like everything else.)

Vista gets a lot of bad press, much of it unfair if you have a powerful enough machine. That said, Microsoft has dropped the ball in some ways. Vista really doesn't deliver anything new in a productivity sense, it just requires more resources and introduces various quirks and incompatibilities, and what you see is what you get--Microsoft has blown their gunpowder until 2010. (I know there is some talk of delivering Windows 7 by 2009, but I don't believe it.) There really is quite a gap between Vista and Leopard now in terms of functionality, and that gap will likely only increase if Apple continues its track record of delivering OS updates at a faster rate. Also, quite unlike Vista, Leopard is both faster and *less* memory-intensive. I often have nearly every application on my dock running, six virtual desktops open, and am only typically using 1.3 GB of RAM. The independent developer community for Macs is vibrant, Apple itself is pushing out some great applications (Aperture, Keynote, Logic Pro, Color, etc.), and you can still run the odd Windows app when you want through VMWare Fusion. There is no "32-bit version" and "64-bit version" of OS X, nor is there an overpriced "Ultimate" version which you need if you want features like volume shadow copy. There is only one, unified version, that can take advantage of 64-bit address spaces by default. It's just a nice operating system.

Note that Apple does overprice their RAM. If you want 6GB of RAM or something fierce, just buy it from a local computer store or NewEgg and put it in. The machines, on the other hand, are fairly priced for what you get, and resale prices on eBay are exceptionally high, if you get a Mac and hate it. You probably won't though.

-- Chris

Thanks Chris for your input.

I have read more than one article by tech reviewers who switched to Macs after trying both Vista and Leopard. It seems so strange to consider switching platforms (though I do have some Mac experience from a former work position), but I happen to have the resources to make it feasible at the moment, and a number of articles have suggested, as you did, that software development for OS X has become particularly vibrant recently. Since others indicate, as you did, that you can run Windows programs seamlessly on the Intel-iMacs, I am finding it hard to find a reason not to switch, given complaints about Vista being a resource hog.

Randall

I sometimes wonder if I live in two different, but parallel, worlds. I hear and respect your personal observations with the different OS', but I also hear many people in the photographic community loudly complaining about the speed, or lack thereof, when they run Aperture on well equiped Macs. I will not judge any system on one program, or one personal observation, but it certainly makes me want to judge for myself before making any radical changes in my own computing set-up (currently XP Pro). I guess YMMV is more than just a disclaimer. I wish you good luck, and good speed, with whatever system you choose!

--Ken

Randall,

I recently added a MacBookPro to my toolkit after following forums and asking around for about 12 months. As I hinted in the Scrivener thread I am very pleased with it (mind you I am typing this on my old Thinkpad).

There are some comforting aspects to the Mac. Generally the OS seems better thought out than Windows and the OS upgrades from Panther to Tiger and now to Leopard have all come with increases in performance. (but also a fair share of upgrade woes it would seem, so this is not a unique feature of Windows).

In terms of performance, the consensus seemed to be that for the same spec, the Macs are about a 1/3 faster than XP. Certainly my slightly better specified XP desktop feels sluggish compared to my MacBookPro ( this includes running the same programs on both platforms eg LightRoom). It should also be said that running Linux (Ubuntu) on the same desktop seems incredibly fast compared to the either the Mac or XP .

I have some Windows only programs so I will still be running a Windows box for special purposes, but my everyday needs will now being filled with the Mac and Linux. This is a "will be" because until I can afford a "backup" Mac I can't fully switch.

As an aside, Parrallels is not currently a reliable professional solution to running Windows programs on the Mac as not everything will fully run in Parrallels and upgrades can break programs that had been running before the upgrade.

Overall, I can't see many people regretting a switch to a Mac.

Graham

Aperture is slower than Lightroom on the same machine, I definitely agree there. That's one reason I use Lightroom. On the other hand, Aperture is the more versatile of the two.

-- Chris


Ken wrote:

I sometimes wonder if I live in two different, but parallel, worlds. I hear and respect
your personal observations with the different OS', but I also hear many people in the
photographic community loudly complaining about the speed, or lack thereof, when
they run Aperture on well equiped Macs. I will not judge any system on one program, or
one personal observation, but it certainly makes me want to judge for myself before
making any radical changes in my own computing set-up (currently XP Pro). I guess YMMV
is more than just a disclaimer. I wish you good luck, and good speed, with whatever
system you choose!

--Ken

Folks:

I have never been one to get involved in OS wars. OSes seldom drive computer purchases, applications software does. I have always liked the Mac a little better than Windows, mostly because of the software that I use. I have had a Windows XP machine at home for the last 6 years, and it worked fine for what I needed it for.
That being said, I just switched from Windows XP to Mac OSX. There were two drivers for me. One was the availability of software on the Mac. I currently use DevonThink Pro for most of my data accumulation. I also have Eaglefiler. I like them both. The other driver was cost. When I was shopping for laptops, there was little difference between a Macbook, and a Windows laptop running Vista, and so that and the availability of Devonthink made the difference.

There is lots of good, useful software on the Windows platform. And it is encouraging to see so many different info managers on the Windows side. I have always liked Zoot; Onenote has had a place of honor on my machine at work ever since the very first beta. Ecco, Evenote, the list goes on. There are also lots of good info managers on the Mac side. Devonthink, Yojimbo, Eaglefiler, Aquaminds Notetaker, Mori, and so on.

The bottom line is, decide what you want to do-then find the software to do it. At that point the choice of an operating system will be obvious.

On another note, I have been busy with work and haven't had a chance to exercise Devonthink Pro and Eaglefiler to their full extent. I have been stuffing them both with data, and soon I will be turning to how to organize the information when you get it in, and how to do searches to get it out.

I'll let everyone here know how things are going in that area soon.

Jim wrote:

That being
said, I just switched from Windows XP to Mac OSX. There were two drivers for me. One was
the availability of software on the Mac. I currently use DevonThink Pro for most of my
data accumulation. I also have Eaglefiler. I like them both.

Yesterday I thought I had decided to stay with XP, but today I am leaning toward going through the process of switching to Mac OSX. One reason is that there are some programs available on the Mac that I would like to use (Scrivener, DevonThink Pro, Eaglefiler, and OminOutliner Pro), plus, as best as I can tell from user forums, my most used program (Sibelius) will run faster on a Mac Pro.

The second issue is that I have heard too many complaints about Vista to want to switch to that (I've talked to a couple of tech support people who rolled every machine back to XP after trying use Vista). And after researching buying a new machine with XP on it, I found that I was generally offered that option only on a limited number of models, and seldom on the most powerful.

The bottom line is, decide what you want to do-then find
the software to do it. At that point the choice of an operating system will be obvious.

The final straw has been the simple task of installing Quicken 2008. It installed fine on my wife's XP. But on my desktop and laptop the installer removed the old version of Quicken and then failed to install the new. I went to the forum, and it is a problem that others are having. Apparently, somewhere in the depths of the Windows' registry I still have some reference to an older version of Quicken that is hanging up the installation.

I have tried all the suggested work arounds to no avail, and I have even tried using regedit to search through the registry and remove all references to Intuit and Quicken. After working on this for a couple of hours last night with no success, I was reminded of numerous other times I had had installations issues related to the registry.

Although Quicken support staff seem to be looking for a solution, they are essentially blaming the OS. I have read several reviews of Vista that complained that MS did not try to revamp the arcane registry system, and when software programmers at a company that has been around as long as Intuit are struggling to figure out why the registry is killing their installation, you realize that this is a valid criticism.

I've prided myself that in the past I have eventually always been able to solve such issues (although on one other occasion with another software program the problem was never solved, even by tech support). Last night I decided that spending hours trying to solve registry problems was a poor use of my time. I'm sure that no operating system is going to be trouble free, especially when installing new programs. And I can appreciate that MS is trying to maintain backward compatibility, but at this stage of my life I'd rather move to a system that has been designed around a newer, less trouble prone core.

Randall

The other driver was

cost. When I was shopping for laptops, there was little difference between a Macbook,
and a Windows laptop running Vista, and so that and the availability of Devonthink
made the difference.

On another note, I have been busy with work and haven't had a chance to exercise
Devonthink Pro and Eaglefiler to their full extent. I have been stuffing them both
with data, and soon I will be turning to how to organize the information when you get it
in, and how to do searches to get it out.

I'll let everyone here know how things are
going in that area soon.

I purchased a fairly powerful, Widows laptop a year ago, but after seeing how irksome Vista is and other irksome Windows "features" I think my next machine will be a Mac. Perhaps some of you have some knowledge of how the OSs compare? For instance:

1. Windows registry is an arcane abomination. Among other problems is that of reinstalling a program. Many programs save in the registry (rather than in an ini file) any special settings one has made. So one has to manually reenter these settings when one reinstalls a program.

2. Windows has an unbelievably heavy background overhead. It is constantly opening strange files and then saving them, even if they are unchanged. That is, it creates massive disk activity, often for no discernible reason. [If you have ever used GoBack, you know what I mean.]

3. MS is sloppy with its Windows updates. Often they "break" a previously running program. (A Toshiba manager suggested that I NOT run Windows updates.)

4. MS sometimes stealth updates one's Windows OS, even if one has purposely set Windows NOT to update. What's worse, some of these updates break parts of Windows! This stealth activity also suggests that MS has put a "backdoor" in Windows and that it may be secretly collecting info from one's computer.

-c

Perhaps some of you have some knowledge of how the OSs compare? For instance:

Windows registry is an arcane abomination. Among other problems is that of
reinstalling a program. Many programs save in the registry (rather than in an ini
file) any special settings one has made. So one has to manually reenter these settings
when one reinstalls a program.

Typically Mac applications (such as Opal) save settings in your Preferences folder. Which makes it easy to back them up.

2. Windows has an unbelievably heavy background
overhead.

I have 15 applications open in my Dock, but my Mac is 85% idle.

3. MS is sloppy with its
Windows updates. Often they "break" a previously running program. (A Toshiba
manager suggested that I NOT run Windows updates.)

IMO it's not the update itself but the act of updating that often causes problems -- including on the Mac. After all, if there's a bad spot on your hard disk, the new files might end up on it.

4. MS sometimes stealth updates
one's Windows OS

Never seen this from Apple.

I think your Windows criticisms tend to boil down to not feeling in control. David Dunham already answered your registry question, but in general one of the nice things about the Mac is that it puts you back in control. Your application preferences (as well as system preferences) are stored as individual text files (as XML, but it doesn't really matter) in ~/Library/Preferences. You can pick and choose which preferences you want to move to another computer. You can open the files and tweak values directly. If you want to start from scratch with a program, just blow away its preferences file. For applications that maintain other data, it's all in ~/Library/Application Support. Want to move all your passwords (Internet passwords, network shares, etc.) to a new computer? Just copy the file in ~/Library/Keychains to a new computer. When something goes wrong, you have a much better chance of fixing it because it's clear what's going on. The monolithic registry is such a disaster because it's impossible to figure out. You end up reinstalling Windows to fix things. Huge waste of time.

-- Chris

Cassius wrote:

I purchased a fairly powerful, Widows laptop a year ago, but after seeing how irksome
Vista is and other irksome Windows "features" I think my next machine will be a Mac.
Perhaps some of you have some knowledge of how the OSs compare? For instance:

1.
Windows registry is an arcane abomination. Among other problems is that of
reinstalling a program. Many programs save in the registry (rather than in an ini
file) any special settings one has made. So one has to manually reenter these settings
when one reinstalls a program.

2. Windows has an unbelievably heavy background
overhead. It is constantly opening strange files and then saving them, even if they
are unchanged. That is, it creates massive disk activity, often for no discernible
reason. [If you have ever used GoBack, you know what I mean.]

3. MS is sloppy with its
Windows updates. Often they "break" a previously running program. (A Toshiba
manager suggested that I NOT run Windows updates.)

4. MS sometimes stealth updates
one's Windows OS, even if one has purposely set Windows NOT to update. What's worse,
some of these updates break parts of Windows! This stealth activity also suggests
that MS has put a "backdoor" in Windows and that it may be secretly collecting info from
one's computer.

-c

Chris,

Thank you for your description of the Mac OS X system of storing application and system preferences and data. You hit the nail on the head about not feeling in control with Windows registry, and the Mac system you describe sounds much easier to easy to understand. And moving applications to a new or different computer sounds far easier with Mac OS X than with Windows. Your explanation was the tipping point for me. I'm switching over to Mac in the next few months.

Randall

Chris Thompson wrote:

I think your Windows criticisms tend to boil down to not feeling in control. David
Dunham already answered your registry question, but in general one of the nice things
about the Mac is that it puts you back in control. Your application preferences (as
well as system preferences) are stored as individual text files (as XML, but it
doesn't really matter) in ~/Library/Preferences. You can pick and choose which
preferences you want to move to another computer. You can open the files and tweak
values directly. If you want to start from scratch with a program, just blow away its
preferences file. For applications that maintain other data, it's all in
~/Library/Application Support. Want to move all your passwords (Internet
passwords, network shares, etc.) to a new computer? Just copy the file in
~/Library/Keychains to a new computer. When something goes wrong, you have a much
better chance of fixing it because it's clear what's going on. The monolithic
registry is such a disaster because it's impossible to figure out. You end up
reinstalling Windows to fix things. Huge waste of time.