Which operating system do you use most?

[Remilia Scarlet]

Graf Zahl said:

Let's define 'superb' as: 'runs almost any program as intended'.

That's the exact reason I run Linux, as Vista (and XP) fail to run almost any program I desire to run as intended. Different OSes for different uses and users. I may dislike Vista, but it's for other reasons, not because it won't run my programs. Same with XP.

[exp(x)]

I started playing around with linux on a server in 2002. I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since 2004, and I removed all Windows installations from my computers in 2006. This year I replaced WinXP on my wife's laptop with Ubuntu. WHAT DOES 2010 HAVE IN STORE?!

[chungy]

Graf Zahl said:

Let's define 'superb' as: 'runs almost any program as intended'.

Linux fails big time for this criteria. That's dog shit for me. I don't care about the OS's theoretical capabilities. They are of no use to me if I can't run the software I want without creating any fuss.

If you want to get in a pissing match, this is the exact reason I don't use Windows, because it doesn't run anything I would want (or even need, in the case of work) to run. Well sure, I could fool around with Cygwin, but it's slow and doesn't even run everything; or fool around with coLinux or a virtualizer, but I might as well be running the real thing. Windows fails big time for this criteria.

exp(x) said:

WHAT DOES 2010 HAVE IN STORE?!

The switch to Debian, of course! :)

[Graf Zahl]

John Smith said:

Okay then vista is definitely not superb. It runs lots of recent programs well, some need patches, but as far as almost any program goes, "as intended" does not at all fit the way Vista runs them. Maybe XP, but Vista, fuck no bitch.

Strange. I've been using Vista for more than a year now and I never *EVER* encountered a single program that refused to run on my new system but started properly on my old XP machine.

So I suspect that you did not configure your system properly. If you want Vista to work you HAVE to disable UAC, despite all the warnings Windows tries to annoy you with and the nonsense that's being said about it being useful. It's not and any Vista machine with it enabled will exhibit the problems many people complain about.

MikeRS said:

If you want to get in a pissing match, this is the exact reason I don't use Windows,

You must use strange software... :P

[destx]

Shaikoten said:

APPLE MICE ARE STUPID SO THEIR OS SUCKS HURRR

I'm inclined to agree that Apple usually drops the ball with their mice, which is why I always use Microsoft mice with my Macs. If nothing else, Microsoft makes some fucking great mice.

Unfortunately a great many people are still under the impression that Apple computers do not support mice with more than one button. This hasn't been the truth for over a decade. I have a 5 button intellimouse pulgged into this Mac Mini and it works perfectly.

As for the "graphically bloated" operating system, you can turn all of that stuff off if you like - just like in most other modern OSes.

ps cool jpegs bro :))))))

[GreyGhost]

Shaikoten said:

I could also be pissed at Macs because I had 9 out of the 14 computers in a lab die completely over Thanksgiving break, when no one was touching them. . . They just all stopped working at the exact same time. Conspicuously just out of their warranty.

The five that didn't die are obviously defective and should be replaced immediately. :-)

[Kyka]

Yeah, Vista is an overblown slug. But consider:

1)It looks real purty, and
2)Because it is designed to do "'"everything"'" (this word has probably been trademarked by Microsoft), it needs a reasonably hefty system to run fresh out of the box.

Therefore, it is clearly designed for people who
1)want things to look purty, and
2)have cash to drop on a beefy computer system.

In short, Vista is aimed at the vast majority of average people. It is a commercial product aimed at a consumer market. In that sense, it does exactly what it is designed to do. Heh. But don't expect it to do very specific things very well.

Anyone who knows anything about computers can customize it to a large extent, so it at least can be made to run ok.

On topic, the main pc in my house is a dual boot with XP/PC linux 2007 OS.
Other computers: one pc that runs linux, and one that runs XP (Formerly Vista, but it was a pain in the butt.)

[Fredrik]

Bucket said:

I'm trying to understand here... the laptop CAME with Vista, but it took 3 hours to install...?

Yep. All was on the hard drive, which makes it all the more remarkable.

[Maes]

Windows, in different flavours.

XP for my main b0x, 98SE on my oldskool machine, and I perform at least two daily fresh installations/repair installations of XP or 2000 at work (for the army). I also used 2003 Server occasionally, for specialty work.

No, I'm not an MS Certified Professional yet, but I worked with a couple of people that are.

If I was asked to say which is the "better OS" in absolute terms, I would answer "Amiga OS": smallest, fastest, and more feature packed of all times, especially if time of release and target hardware is taken into account.

For the rest I feel it's just up to the job you want done. The average Joe Consumer is pretty happy with Windows "will my funderful cheapo TV tuner card and MS Flight Simulator work with windows?", and server admins are pretty happy with Linux.

[Graf Zahl]

Kyka said:

Yeah, Vista is an overblown slug. But consider:

2)Because it is designed to do "'"everything"'" (this word has probably been trademarked by Microsoft), it needs a reasonably hefty system to run fresh out of the box.

Therefore, it is clearly designed for people who
2)have cash to drop on a beefy computer system.

This complaint, repeated endlessly by some people is totally groundless. Microsoft designed an OS that can be shipped with today's computers and runs well on them, not with old hardware

If you are stupid enough to try to install it on a more than 5 year old machine that was low end back then nobody should complain that it has problems. It was not designed to run on it.

It's somehow comparable with some things in the Doom engine. Doom had massive workarounds to work on 4MB systems. Even most of today's ports still have these mechanisms in place (e.g. the zone heap.) These things were useful 15 years ago but on modern systems they become an obstacle. And yes, this stuff comes with a penalty on modern systems, e.g. clunky configuration settings for something that shouldn't need configuring at all! Of course if you configure wrong it doesn't work optimally, either because there's not enough memory available for your game or you are allocating too much and bring down performance in other parts of the system, taking the zone heap as an example.

So what do you do if you want to optimize your program for these newer systems? Right, you remove the obstacles, knowing fully well that they might come with a penalty on old low end systems. But you know that your program is not designed for this hardware and on newer systems it works better than if you still had your workarounds in place.

Wanna bet that most of the things that bring down Vista's performance on low end systems are precisely that?

(And let's disregard the flashy user interface stuff Vista adds for now. That can be switched off and any sane Vista user I know has done so.)

[HackNeyed]

Always used one version or another of Windows since I grew up on DOS and 3.11 for Workgroups and then Win95 and so on and never had a need to change.

I've installed XP Pro on my gaming and work PCs.

I've installed XP Pro and cloned it to dual boot my laptop for 'personal' and 'business' use. The laptop came with Vista and I might put it back on for personal use but I have to keep an XP on it for business.

I've installed Vista Ultimate on my Home Theater PC (HTPC). I bought the OEM version at a nice price.

I've toyed with flavors of Linux (Ubuntu being the nicest I guess) and have really, really though of dual booting my laptop and or gaming PC though again I just don't have a need for it.

Finally I have DOS, FreeDOS, Win98, clones of XP, Linux distros and so on in virtual machines from time to time.

[Patrick]

I have my laptop partitioned so that I run Windows 98 and Ubuntu, then I have a PC which is currently running XP, because I had it custom built with XP. I would need to use Vista more to see what it's like first.

[Kyka]

Graf Zahl said:

stuff

Don't at all disagree with what you are saying. You make a good argument. But my point was merely that Vista is a commercial product, and as such, is driven by a commercial market. Hence the concept of dropping cash on a newer system. It is what drives the market. Trying to make Vista work on an older system is not the point, as far as Microsoft (or most people) are concerned. Selling more stuff is the point. I never said that people installing Vista on a 5 year old system was a good idea.

Speaking of Doom, I was actually the first person I knew to get a 486 that had 8mb of memory. And playing Doom on my "beast" was the shit, let me tell you.

[Creaphis]

Kyka said:

And playing Doom on my "beast" was the shit, let me tell you.

That's nothing compared to playing a downhill-skiing simulator on an IBM XT - one which I "installed" by copying every line out of a book and typing it into GWBASIC. I was the talk of the town.

[spank]

OSX kicks ass.

[NightmareZer0]

Windows XP all the way

[Grazza]

Creaphis said:

one which I "installed" by copying every line out of a book and typing it into GWBASIC. I was the talk of the town.

Eh, thems were the days.

[Inferno]

Windows Xp.

[Chilly Willy]

Graf Zahl said:

This complaint, repeated endlessly by some people is totally groundless. Microsoft designed an OS that can be shipped with today's computers and runs well on them, not with old hardware

If you are stupid enough to try to install it on a more than 5 year old machine that was low end back then nobody should complain that it has problems. It was not designed to run on it.

Yes, that's why MS is facing a class action lawsuit on the matter. ;)

You're wrong in every respect here. When Vista shipped, benchmarks were run on current TOP END systems. If you were lucky, some programs only slowed by 5%. Most slowed by 20% to 30%. A few were 50% to 100% slower. Installing the service pack and turning EVERYTHING off can get most of the speed back, but if you turn everything off, what makes it any different than XP?

That's another problem the average person runs into - turning things off. Have you checked the Vista TweekGuide over at TweekGuides? Tell me the average person could do half of them and I'll laugh in your face until you slink back beneath your rock. The average person can hardly set the wallpaper - don't even ask them to edit the registry!

[chungy]

[Csonicgo]

I use Windows XP. Vista is ok, but I'm not one to switch OSes until I have to. But since many still use XP, I'm sure I'll be safe for a few more months(years?).

[GreyGhost]

Maes said:

If I was asked to say which is the "better OS" in absolute terms, I would answer "Amiga OS": smallest, fastest, and more feature packed of all times, especially if time of release and target hardware is taken into account.

I was blown away by Amiga DOS back in the 80's - fancy being able to run more than one program at once! An Amiga 1000 with it's 7Mhz CPU, 512k of RAM and Workbench 1.1 on a single floppy is subjectively no slower than a modern PC running Vista - Moore's Law is only just keeping up with increasingly bloated operating systems.

Creaphis said:

That's nothing compared to playing a downhill-skiing simulator on an IBM XT - one which I "installed" by copying every line out of a book and typing it into GWBASIC. I was the talk of the town.

"City Bomber" on a VIC20 - typed in from a magazine listing. Those were the days.

[Graf Zahl]

MikeRS said:

I think I'll copy+paste a post I said somewhere else. Feel free to counter any part of it if you wish.

Trust me. I will. :D

In my opinion, Windows 98 was really the turning point where they would do nothing but go downhill from. I actually switched to Linux a few months before Windows 98 was released, so maybe I’m somewhat biased based on how superior Linux’s UIs were even then, so this is really my disclaimer…

I'll say up front that I have never worked with Linux for longer. That said, I have seen user interfaces that made me puke and ones that looked really nice. But generally saying that Linux UIs (implying all of them) were superior is definitely wrong.

Windows 98 was slower, consumed far more RAM, crashed more often than Windows 95, etc.

It was designed for stronger computers. Read my argument above. In the 3 years between Win95 and Win98 a lot has changed about computer hardware. I have used it for 4 years and never had any serious problems with it aside from the deficiencies of the entire series's design (meaning Win95-WinME.) I can't say that it was particularly unstable (ME is a different story...)

I honestly never understood why it got more popular than Win95, when to me it was very similar to the recent “XP vs. Vista” thing.

Maybe that was because Win95 had the typical problems of the first product in a series that were gone in Win98?

Because of this popularity, Microsoft could never learn from the mistakes, they just continued them. Windows Me was basically “Windows 98 Third Edition” with very little enhancements;

I have no idea what was going on with ME but it was an utter piece of shit. When one of my computer was trashed I re-installed with ME. Worst mistake I ever made. In any case, saying that ME had any enhancements over 98 is just wrong. It was just a slightly overhauled Win98 with a lot of bugs introduced. And it was obvious that M$ did not give this product the QA it needed because they were focussing on XP already.

Windows 2000 also had almost the exact same interface, though its saving grace was a better operating system for its base (it has a good number of core enhancements over NT 4, although the UI looked worse). Windows XP added the teletubbies UI and that was pretty much it, save for double the disk space and RAM requirements from Win2000.

Teletubbies UI? That's a good one. ;) I have to agree that it was ugly as hell so the first thing I did was to switch back to the classic look. Much better.

I’ve been pondering somewhat why the market hasn’t simply adopted Windows Vista as it has with previous, completely uninnovative versions such as WinXP. I believe, and this is only my opinion not a statement of fact, that it boils down to a few factors:

You may call XP uninnovative if you look at Win2000 as its predecessor - and in that context it is true. However, you should not forget that for 90% of all users Win98 was the true predecessor - and from that point of view it was a massive improvement - provided you had a system that was good enough of course.

With Vista the situation is different. Unless you are in dire need of DX10 it doesn't offer much that may motivate upgrading - especially if you have to pay for it.
And Microsoft made the fatal mistake of having the security center enabled at a level that basically ensured that it'd piss off users that were transitioning from XP. A smarter approach would have been to do this transition gradually so that people get used to it. I still download new software on occasion that wouldn't work with it enabled.

1. The hardware requirements are enormously larger than its predecessors. Though all previous versions were also more bloated than the previous ones, I think people were used to Windows XP and were shocked at Windows Vista — the thing doesn’t even run well with a gigabyte of RAM, and requires at least 20GB of disk space.

So what? Any modern computer has that much space. The system has been optimized for systems which are sold today, not 3 years ago! But that's something people like you tend to conveniently forget.

2. Windows releases were about 2 years apart in the past, the successively larger versions were perhaps less of a concern. They were fairly moderate compared to the growth of hardware — at least Windows stayed on par with predecessors in terms of speed, though requiring new hardware. For example, a new Windows 98 computer in 1998 seemed about as fast as a new Windows 95 computer in 1995, even though the hardware should have allowed a far faster operating system (indeed, Linux has very little bloat, and the speed increases are very apparent in Linux). Windows Vista, on the other hand, had almost no attempt to seem as fast as new 2001 computers running WinXP, on new 2007 computers running Vista; only in the last half of 2008 are computers really fast enough to run Vista with an apparent speed of a 2001 Windows XP computer.

Biggest - Pile - Of - Nonsense - Ever!
I bought my last 2 computers in the summer of 2004 and last september. THe old one was a 3.2 GHz P4 with XP and 512 MB RAM. The newer one was a CoreQuad 2.4 GHZ with Vista and 3MB RAM. The price was the same so I'd say they are comparable in this regard. And now take a guess which one performs better.

3. Feature bloat — this has been true of all previous versions of Windows as well, but Vista really took the cake. There’s programs in Vista for several tasks, especially multimedia ones, and almost all of them are inferior to third-party products (including open source, yes) predating them. Nobody wants to use the built-in Vista programs, they just waste disk space as people continue using all the 3rd-party applications they are familiar with and technically superior.

Sure, Vista's multimedia programs are a waste of space but as long as they only consume HD space, who cares?
The percentage of HD space Vista needs on a modern system is still smaller than the percentage XP needed on my 4 year old system. On that one I was constantly fighting with available HD space. On my current one I'm not despite Vista's 'bloat'.

4. Software and hardware incompatibility; every version of Windows has suffered these two problems, though not to the degree that Vista encountered.

That coming from a Linux user is a good one! I'd still say that Vista is more compatible with XP as some Linux distributions among each other.

Vista is incompatible with a phenomenal amount of software (some people even say that Wine is more compatible with Windows than Vista is)

Some people simply don't have a clue how to configure a system. I had problems with only one component in Vista: The security center and its cursed UAC. After that was disabled everything ran fine. Even some older games that had constant problems on my XP system suddenly worked again!

— even old Microsoft applications sometimes fail to run (eg, Microsoft Office 97).

Ironically it's really old M$ products I had the most problems with. I think this is because Microsoft's developers knew the OS too well and programmed too specifically.

Programs for Windows 95/98/Me that barely ran on WinXP with its compatibility-mode hacks, most likely will never run at all on Windows Vista.

These programs were poorly written. Would you compromise your system with holes as big as a meteorite crater just to run some hackish old software? Sometimes you have to draw a line if you are planning for the future.

On top of the hardware incompatibility — Microsoft had intentionally removed Windows XP driver support for whatever reason (it was still fully functional with Windows XP drivers through RC2), and with it, almost nothing supported Vista in the beginning of 2007.

They did not 'intentionally remove' XP driver support. They developed a completely new driver model to make it more secure and the old drivers did not work with this.

Infamous examples include NVIDIA graphics cards and Lexmark printers. Some, like NVIDIA and Lexmark, eventually rewrote drivers for Vista, while others, especially from companies who went bankrupt, may never even see a Windows Vista driver. The problem is two-fold: first, that Microsoft deliberately removed WinXP driver support, and secondly, they off-hand driver development to the vendors themselves. In the second part of the problem, it’s a design decision and not necessarily a bad one if you can guarantee the vendors to release new drivers for new versions of your operating system;

I won't comment on the problems. That was to be expected that such a transition would be painful for some people relying on old hardware. But hasn't this always been the case that things became obsolete even though you'd love to use it again?

Linux takes the other route: most drivers are developed in the Linux kernel or X.org (for video drivers). Operating system upgrades rarely remove hardware support; hell, a month ago I plugged in a parallel port Zip100 drive from around 1994, and it was still fully supported in Debian Lenny.

I wonder in which way that is better, especially if it concerns some obscure hardware only few people care about. Chances are you won't get drivers at all for lots of things.

[quote}
5. The market becoming aware of superior alternatives, such as Linux and Mac OS X.
[/quote]Now to be as blunt as possible:

1. Linux will only become superior if this nonsense with 1000 different distributions, all in some way incompatible with each other, stops. The current Linux landscape makes it a very, very unattractive system for general use. People don't want to be bothered with such shit.

Honestly, I'd love to see Linux emerge as the winner but the general attitude of the Linux community will effectively prevent that from happening any time soon.
The Linux community has to acknowledge that not all is well and find ways to change that. But instead too often people just get shouted down. It's not a place I like to hang out and if that is the case, imagine how the general public might see it.

2. Calling MacOS superior is a joke, right? I am working in software development and in all the years I have not met one single person who likes it! That's correct: Not One Single Person! Some grudgingly use it because they have no choice but those are the ones who complain loudest.
Besides, as long as Apple restricts it to its own hardware it will never become an alternative.

Windows’ old crusty design (which looked very bad to informed computer enthusiasts at Windows XP’s launch even) can simply no longer survive with an increasing number of savvy computer users.

No, Windows is not perfect but as long as 'savvy computer users' equates to 'nerds with too much time on their hands' it doesn't really matter. These people may be a vocal minority on the internet but in real life they don't really matter and what's worse often have an attitude that only serves to alienate others.
No matter what software related forum I visit, the most annoying bunch aside from the trolls are always the Linux zealots.

They are starting to realize there are better solutions than Windows. Apple has taken many opportunities to attack Vista, and they are becoming quite successful at luring in old Windows users (which is probably better attributed to Microsoft’s own failing than the not-quite-as-clever-as-they-think Apple marketing department).

Let's say it this way: If there is one company I trust less than Microsoft, it's Apple. Should they ever gain dominance I fear the very worst for the computer market.

Microsoft is mainly a software developer so they have never had a chance to dictate the hardware market and this is where Apple is noticably different. Their tendency of locking their own hardware to their software could be a major problem. For example, the company I work for had to buy an overpriced Mac just to be able to do iPhone development. Talk about tying your customers to your own products...

The new netbook market has been introducing people to an operating system, Linux, that doesn’t need to be rebooted daily to remain active,

Neither does my Vista system. The longest I had it running without interruption was 5 days so far. I'm not sure how long it could do because obviously I switch it off for the night. ;)

XP - that's a different animal though. No, I can't run my XP system for longer than a day without rebooting.

doesn’t need to worry about viruses or malware (though the former is prevented by the OS design itself, the later might some day latch itself to Linux, and since it’s mostly social engineering, OS design can’t prevent it), hell, Linux is secure enough that average users don’t even need a firewall attached to their machine (before I got a router, my own computer was directly connected to the Internet for about 7 years, no firewall, and never once was broken into).

You may be convinced that Linux is secure but I think the criminal energy of virus developers is strong enough that they will find ways to infect Linux as well if it'd be worth the effort. Let's talk about this again in the (improbable) case that Linux gains a significant market share.

Still, concerning the internet the best strategy is to trust no one. You can never be too well protected. I never had a virus malware infection since I did the first system update on my first XP installation.

[RTC_Marine]

I have been a geek for NT based windows systems for years now, mainly because I have always found it to be the superior type of OS I have ever used.

I did go down the linux path, started with redhat 6.2 iirc, I didn't find the commercial distributions to be that bad since I could atleast get a minor amount of support for them, but everything else was a mosh pit.

Later on I decided to give freebsd 4.x a go and that was a ton better in terms of reliability and compatibility, but eventually the crowd has sort of gone "the linux way" and I sorta dropped it because of that.

So now I tend to avoid unix related systems now, if I really had to use one it would be openbsd, only for server related things of course.

I have to say that the 9x/ME series of windows sucked, you had to run a fairly clean installation to prevent anything bad from happening, 95b/c wasn't as bad but with the integration of iexplore (which was very buggy at the time) in 98+ could bring the whole system down.

You could do the same with NT4, only the problems were less apparent, normally the system would only die if you had bad hardware and/or crappy 3rd party drivers installed.

Also..

The newer one was a CoreQuad 2.4 GHZ with Vista and 3MB RAM.

I have to say that is quite an achievement ;)

[Maes]

Heh, it's always comical when someone is accusing windows of backwards incompatibility problems, while it's the OS with the greatest backwards compatibility of them all, thanks to -or despite- numerous hacks required to make that happen.

As I had stated here:

I had said:Despite its flaws, Windows (or rather, the Dos-Wintel platform) has the most far-fetched compatibility record of any computer system built to date.

Plug in a 5.25" drive with DOS 1.0 on a dual core intel, and it will work. Try running a windows 1.0 application in Windows XP (the 32-bit version, at least) and it will also run, buttons menus and all. You can even develop and directly test Windows 1.0 apps if you wanted to! The only exception are those DOS applications that bang too much directly on the hardware (practically, most video games of the 90s and scene demos) but you can run most 80s and some 90s DOS games without sound, while a compatibility layer like VDMSound will enable you to run a lot of them natively (without using a CPU emulator like DOSbox).

Perhaps only AmigaOS and Sunix/SunOS have historically been that much backwards compatible without resorting to virtualization or system-in-system emulation.

On the converse, e.g. Mac users find it perfectly normal to scrap backwards compatibility with each successive relase of MacOS (even without a CPU family change), and even the provided emulation layers, as good as they may be, are considered superfluous once "new updated versions of software X have been released". Riiiiight...

Linux is another beast altogether....I don't expect anything but the most trivial and clean command line programs to run smoothly in any modern distros, especially if they were compiled against, say, a 1996 version of the Kernel. Sure, if you're used to compiling the whole fucking OS from scratch, you can see why that's not much of a problem.

[Graf Zahl]

RTC_Marine said:

I have to say that is quite an achievement ;)

Shit! I don't know how many times I made that typo... It's not the first time. :D

Maes said:

stuff about compatibility.

How true! I still can run many original executables of >10 year old games on Vista. I doubt that the same would be true with Linux, considering that there's even problems with executables compiled for distro A running on B.

And we really don't need to talk about MacOS, do we? Didn't they change processor architecture twice in this time?

[pcorf]

I use Win XP but its set to the Win 98 look.

[leileilol]

I use Linux but with qvwm. I wish that didn't die

[fraggle]

Graf Zahl said:

1. Linux will only become superior if this nonsense with 1000 different distributions, all in some way incompatible with each other, stops. The current Linux landscape makes it a very, very unattractive system for general use. People don't want to be bothered with such shit.

Honestly, I'd love to see Linux emerge as the winner but the general attitude of the Linux community will effectively prevent that from happening any time soon.
The Linux community has to acknowledge that not all is well and find ways to change that. But instead too often people just get shouted down. It's not a place I like to hang out and if that is the case, imagine how the general public might see it.

I basically agree, with the one exception that it might be possible to negotiate some common "base" between the different distros so that they are compatible in some way. I think this is what LSB is supposed to do, but I don't think it has been very successful.

2. Calling MacOS superior is a joke, right? I am working in software development and in all the years I have not met one single person who likes it! That's correct: Not One Single Person! Some grudgingly use it because they have no choice but those are the ones who complain loudest.
Besides, as long as Apple restricts it to its own hardware it will never become an alternative.

Funny that you say that, because I've found that in the past few years, a very large percentage of the most knowledgeable programmers/computer users that I know have all switched to Macs. Even people who I never thought would have used them have bought Macbooks.

[Bucket]

Graf Zahl said:

Biggest - Pile - Of - Nonsense - Ever!
I bought my last 2 computers in the summer of 2004 and last september. THe old one was a 3.2 GHz P4 with XP and 512 MB RAM. The newer one was a CoreQuad 2.4 GHZ with Vista and 3MB RAM. The price was the same so I'd say they are comparable in this regard. And now take a guess which one performs better.

I'd say the one with 3 megs of RAM performs much worse.

fraggle said:

Funny that you say that, because I've found that in the past few years, a very large percentage of the most knowledgeable programmers/computer users that I know have all switched to Macs. Even people who I never thought would have used them have bought Macbooks.

Uh huh. And what development environment are they using to write all that Windows software that's dominating the market?