Online games - macs
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5630/indepth-with-the-windows-8-consumer-preview/16
Is a perfect illustration of what I mentioned. If you take out POST time on a somewhat modern PC (the Dell Latitude E6410) a clean boot (fresh install) of Win7 takes ~12 seconds. Even the netbook used there only takes ~21 seconds.
Win8 is positively blazing fast, only ~4 seconds after POST. But that's only if you have hibernation enabled on the computer.
That's biggest drawback x86 PCs when building your own machine with off the shelf parts. Especially enthusiast class motherboards spend so friggin much time in POST that it make it seem like it takes forever for the OS to boot, when it's not the fault of the OS.
Regards,
SB
Is a perfect illustration of what I mentioned. If you take out POST time on a somewhat modern PC (the Dell Latitude E6410) a clean boot (fresh install) of Win7 takes ~12 seconds. Even the netbook used there only takes ~21 seconds.
Win8 is positively blazing fast, only ~4 seconds after POST. But that's only if you have hibernation enabled on the computer.
That's biggest drawback x86 PCs when building your own machine with off the shelf parts. Especially enthusiast class motherboards spend so friggin much time in POST that it make it seem like it takes forever for the OS to boot, when it's not the fault of the OS.
Regards,
SB
moreover, i find it hard to believe thay anyone but pc part reviewers really care that much about boot times. I overclock, and rebooting could be a haha moment in winxp, but hardly a deciding factor. you guys both cherry picked your stats, and no, nobody ever got swayed on this subject by what forumites said. 
although mac seemed to have an untouchable foothold in almost every artistic niche, it feels like lately their power user base is eroding. all of my friends who do 3d for architecture or cad have switched to windows. thats a very unscientific observation tho
fwiw, color me pro-windows, although i avoid office, outlook, etc like the plague. it's just fricking quick, at almost everything, and the important options are coveniently exposed. that, and i play games, so, no other options, really. even my music studio pc is windows. there are a hundred mac plugins I'm dying to get my hands on, but my setup is too fast to switch from now.
yes, i wrote this on a phone and my keyboard is fritzing up a bit ;p
although mac seemed to have an untouchable foothold in almost every artistic niche, it feels like lately their power user base is eroding. all of my friends who do 3d for architecture or cad have switched to windows. thats a very unscientific observation tho
fwiw, color me pro-windows, although i avoid office, outlook, etc like the plague. it's just fricking quick, at almost everything, and the important options are coveniently exposed. that, and i play games, so, no other options, really. even my music studio pc is windows. there are a hundred mac plugins I'm dying to get my hands on, but my setup is too fast to switch from now.
yes, i wrote this on a phone and my keyboard is fritzing up a bit ;p
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@tuned I think that when people refer to Mac for graphics it is actually for 2D images done for printing since the default color calibration of the monitor is a lot closer to what would be printed in real life or some such. I don't know if that is still the case or if they just prefer the Mac. However for 3D creation you would most probably want a relatively powerful hardware and to be able to change said hardware when newer, better version comes around. Considering the limited choice of hardware for OSX due to driver support I would seriously advise you against it. IMO not only is it not worth the higher cost of entry for getting a Mac over a PC but it would actually be counter productive. You should rather spend the extra on more powerful hardware
And of course let's not forget the topic of the current thread (games) - you will have a significantly larger selection on Windows than on Mac
@Mize http://cybernetnews.com/background-scroll-windows/ it's cheaper than buying a Mac for background scrolling Also I personally have no problem writing scientific papers on Windows but I guess it also depends on what functionality you need. In my case most of my pictures are pictures of simulations rendered in Visit or Paraview which act pretty much the same between Linux and Windows (haven't tried them on Mac but my guess is there will not be added funcitonality ). The rest of the pictures are mainly some schematics drawn in OpenOffice Draw so that I can export them like a vector image in .eps. The writing is done in Latex and there I also don't have a preference regarding the OS.
And finally when I timed my machine post-OS selection screen it took about 25-30 seconds to load on a pretty bloated installation (not done by me of course) including the windows logo animation and user/password typing on a Lenovo T410s with Intel X18-M SSD drive (I think) and the CPU is also relatively weak - i5 M560.
Don't get me wrong though - I am not trying to sway you away from Mac as that is generally a matter of personal choice
And of course let's not forget the topic of the current thread (games) - you will have a significantly larger selection on Windows than on Mac
@Mize http://cybernetnews.com/background-scroll-windows/ it's cheaper than buying a Mac for background scrolling
Also I personally have no problem writing scientific papers on Windows but I guess it also depends on what functionality you need. In my case most of my pictures are pictures of simulations rendered in Visit or Paraview which act pretty much the same between Linux and Windows (haven't tried them on Mac but my guess is there will not be added funcitonality ). The rest of the pictures are mainly some schematics drawn in OpenOffice Draw so that I can export them like a vector image in .eps. The writing is done in Latex and there I also don't have a preference regarding the OS. And finally when I timed my machine post-OS selection screen it took about 25-30 seconds to load on a pretty bloated installation (not done by me of course
) including the windows logo animation and user/password typing on a Lenovo T410s with Intel X18-M SSD drive (I think) and the CPU is also relatively weak - i5 M560.Don't get me wrong though - I am not trying to sway you away from Mac as that is generally a matter of personal choice
Thanks for the background window scroller. I will give it a shot. My graphics are usually 2D or pseudo 3D representations of mechanical/optical/magnetic designs with flow and fields. Most start out in AutoCAD Inventor on one of my engineers' computers but need to be more artsy and understandable for a non-tech crowd. Plots are to communicate ideas and trends. This is why Easydraw and OmniGraphsketcher are so powerful (and cheap). I used to use CorelDraw for these things but these two are far more powerful and flexible.
OpenOffice Draw doesn't cut it. I used OpenOffice for years (prior to the Mac I have now my last two laptops wer linux only), but collaboration and magazine editors have forced ms office onto my machine
I was actually ready to go with a win7 replacement about 2 months back simply for gaming on long flights (priorities don't y of know), but the best 13" gpu machine I could find was a Sony with an AMD 6350 gpu so I decided to wait. There's a good chance my next laptop will be something with an MS OS, but then I have to find replacements for those two apps or create a hackintosh partition...
OpenOffice Draw doesn't cut it. I used OpenOffice for years (prior to the Mac I have now my last two laptops wer linux only), but collaboration and magazine editors have forced ms office onto my machine
I was actually ready to go with a win7 replacement about 2 months back simply for gaming on long flights (priorities don't y of know), but the best 13" gpu machine I could find was a Sony with an AMD 6350 gpu so I decided to wait. There's a good chance my next laptop will be something with an MS OS, but then I have to find replacements for those two apps or create a hackintosh partition...
