Windows Vista Ultimate

[compilerbitch]

First impressions:

Utter pile of crap.

Avoid.

It shouldn't take a rocket scientist several hours to consistently fail to even be able to download a file. Yes, you heard it. I've spent several hours attempting to download, er, a file. I'll say one thing for it: it's secure. But then, leaving my machine turned off is secure, too, and equivalently functional.

Buy. A. Mac. Instead.

Really.

Comments

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

I currently have a Mac, but I'm thinking about buying a new Ubuntu box, preferably one that can also run some flavour of Windows. Should I look for on that has XP preinstalled?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

My best advice is to go for something preinstalled, so someone else has already got the bugs out of it.

Or get an Intel mac instead, which can run Windows (or Linux for that matter) anyway.

I have had a very, very bad experience building that particular box. I went through two mother boards, CPUs and RAM before I managed to make it work at all, and it's never been particularly stable even then. Eventually Windows just basically keeled over and died, so I installed Vista as a last-ditch effort. It's not like the hardware is even old or unusual -- dual core Athlon X2, 4GB Ram, 400GB SATA hard drive, Radeon X1600 graphics card, Apple Cinema HD monitor, nothing skimped on really. But, frankly, it's been an unstable pile of crap at the end of the day. And since I built it myself, I can't return it under warranty. I've wasted *so much* money on that machine, it really bugs me. Ultimately I built it for running Photoshop and Illustrator primarily, mostly because I already had (legit) Windows copies of both of them. I routinely deal with >1GB Photoshop files, so the need for lots of RAM isn't optional for me.

It's looking like my best option now is probably going to be trying to get an academic discount (I qualify, weirdly) on a top end Mac Mini and Adobe Creative Suite. But CS3 is out shortly, so I may delay slightly. Don't know. Not happy at all currently.

[womble2.livejournal.com]

Why buy new hardware when Ubuntu will run on your Mac? (If it's a PowerPC Mac, I'm aware they're dropping support for PowerPC. Debian will still support it though.)

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

It's a PowerPC Mac, I'd rather run Ubuntu than Debian, and in any case in my experience support is always a bit better for the most used platform...

Also I'd quite like to run both Mac OS X and Ubuntu at the same time. I don't need Windows very often.