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dpaanlka

macrumors 601
Nov 16, 2004
4,869
34
Illinois
63dot said:
acutally, welcome to os x

os 9, while better than the windows 95/98 it competed against, could never open that many programs

umm... I clearly disproved that like two or three posts ago by posting a huge screen shot of 34 programs, in addition to the System Software, running under System 7...
 

briand05

macrumors 6502
Jan 23, 2005
286
71
There is no doubt in my mind that OS X is less prone to crashing than Windows XP. Now Windows XP isn't bad overall but some programs (Windows Movie Maker, Media Center) will definitely cause crashes at times and I've had to reset the XP machine. My iBook has never once actually crashed since I've had it, programs will freeze sometimes yes, but no crashes where you have to reset the machine.
 

bradc

macrumors 6502
Mar 17, 2006
263
0
Canader eh
I have a 2.5ghz Powermac G5 w/ 2gb RAM and in 1.25years of it basically running 24/7, the longest it has been off is 3 days. During those 3days I had the flu:( Since I've owned it, it has crashed I'd say easily less than 10x. It's pretty amazing, a very good testament to build quality too because the G5's are hot little b*stards! Haha.

That said, Windows 2000 is rock solid too! As long as you have good quality hardware, Windows 2000 & Windows Server 2003 are wonderful. I have a server at work that as of yesterday has an uptime of 231 days;) An IBM Dual Xeon Server. Once again, excellent build quality too.

I'm happy to say the least!
 

bigrell486

macrumors 6502
Jul 10, 2006
330
97
Home
SodaPopMonster said:
Picture7.jpg

You seem to be exposé-ing more then you think :D

How could you! Thats $129 in lost revenue! :eek:
No, I actually did the same for OS 10.3 last summer after 10.4 was released. Took me 2 weeks to download on a 56K modem that was connected for about 18 hours a day.
 

Dracula

macrumors member
Jul 27, 2006
30
0
I've had to hard reboot my Intel iMac twice.

Then again watching me use a computer is like watching somone solve a rubbicks cube in 25 seconds.
 

Super Macho Man

macrumors 6502a
Jul 24, 2006
505
0
Hollywood, CA
dpaanlka said:
umm... I clearly disproved that like two or three posts ago by posting a huge screen shot of 34 programs, in addition to the System Software, running under System 7...
Those apps were not doing anything, they were just open, idle, waiting for input. Set a few of them to work simultaneously and things quickly go downhill.
 

FF_productions

macrumors 68030
Apr 16, 2005
2,822
0
Mt. Prospect, Illinois
Super Macho Man said:
Those apps were not doing anything, they were just open, idle, waiting for input. Set a few of them to work simultaneously and things quickly go downhill.

What are you talking about? You need to use Macs more often.

Also, OS 7 is about 10+ years old, I'm impressed myself that it can run that many programs. When I had a Mac running OS 7, it only had about 12 mb's of ram, so I couldn't run too many programs at once..
 

bradc

macrumors 6502
Mar 17, 2006
263
0
Canader eh
Dracula said:
I've had to hard reboot my Intel iMac twice.

Then again watching me use a computer is like watching somone solve a rubbicks cube in 25 seconds.


Easy there killer, you don't have to brag about your super abilities:rolleyes:
 

zephead

macrumors 68000
Apr 27, 2006
1,574
9
in your pants
Wow. Seriously wow. My Dull laptop lags a lot of the time when I'm only running iTunes and Firefox. That's on XP with 256MB of RAM and a 2.2 GHz P4. Oh, and > 3/4 of the 20GB HD full. I actually tried this one time to see how many things I could open on here before the thing totally crapped itself, and I hit the wall at around 7 or so programs before moving the cursor turned into what seemed like a huge task. Looks like I'm in for a big suprise when I buy a MacBook. :D
 

zephead

macrumors 68000
Apr 27, 2006
1,574
9
in your pants
Well it's 4 years old, and I'm not gonna buy anything to upgrade this computer if I'm just gonna get rid of it in a few months anyways.
 

exabytes18

macrumors 6502
Jun 14, 2006
287
0
Suburb of Chicago
This thread inspired me to find out just how many programs I could open on my Windows XP computer. Everything went fine until I got up to the middle 40s. I suppose the computer knows it is in dire need of memory and it refused to open any more programs.

Tally: 41 different programs, several multiple instances of programs. 5 image editing programs including photoshop and corel photopaint. 1 3D game. 2 IDEs. 5 homemade GPU intensive programs. 1 instance of Google Earth. 1 ATi TV channel. MySQL and Apache running in the background still serving requests and queries quite happily actually. All programs were completely responsive at the peak number of programs open.

Specs... 1.8GHz P4 and 1 GB of RAM running Windows XP. :D
 

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JFreak

macrumors 68040
Jul 11, 2003
3,152
9
Tampere, Finland
exabytes18 said:
This thread inspired me to find out just how many programs I could open on my Windows XP computer. Everything went fine until I got up to the middle 40s. I suppose the computer knows it is in dire need of memory and it refused to open any more programs.

Yep, and the answer is: 15 minutes.

Windows memory management has been designed in the late 80's and has been virtually untouched since. During that time situation was that the memory resources were always lacking and reality still is that new programs need memory when they're opened - so instead of "borrowing" the memory management system from the unix, Microsoft actually tried to think of its own solution, and failed miserably.

They thought that if the user does nothing with an application for 15 minutes, the application is considered idle and its memory resources can safely be flushed to much slower virtual memory (hard disk) because nothing will be lost and the released memory can be reused by the application that is possibly being opened soon. So, therefore, most applications are stored to the disk memory and almost nothing is operated on the real memory.

Worked like a charm during the era when 16MB was a lot, and it was actually good. Only that the current memory management system is still somewhat similar, and having gigabytes of memory in a windows system is really not useful. What you did is you loaded apps into memory and faced a drastic slowdown once the system began to flush applications to the disk memory after 15 minutes of use. When that happens, hard drive is working very hard but nothing else is happening.

Coming from that, Apple has really benefited from adopting the unix base. If one adds memory to the system, it instantly adds to the performance. It works, just like other unix systems do. Linux for example, there's no difference in memory management between different unix(-like) operating systems. They rock!

risc said:
You use a computer with 256 MB of RAM? Every OS will suck with that little RAM.

Pre-OSX Macs were perfectly fine with far less than that, and Windows NT4SP3 ran very fast with 128MB. I remember when I upgraded my old 80386-based pc from 1MB to whopping 4MB when Dos 5.0 was being used. My older 8086-based laptop had whopping 512KB of memory, and the operating system (Dos 2.11) had to be booted from a 720k floppy disk.

"Every" is a dangerous word. Use it and you're "always" wrong ;)

briand05 said:
Windows XP isn't bad overall but some programs (Windows Movie Maker, Media Center) will definitely cause crashes at times and I've had to reset the XP machine.

Actually, whenever you try to do anything media-related with Windows, you're in a deep trouble. Windows XP has been built on top of Windows NT kernel which is TERRIBLE on multimedia. Every time Microsoft has introduced new multimedia-features, they have had to break kernel a little bit more. The best NT-kernel is NT4 with service pack 3, and that's IMO the most stable and the fastest Windows ever.

But it sucks at multimedia.
 

Dracula

macrumors member
Jul 27, 2006
30
0
What are you talking about? I never had any trouble watching movies, listening to music, or playing games since the XP came out.

VLC comes for Windows too and it works great.

Not to mention the birage of free media players, including the famous open source "Media Player Classic"

Seriously think before you write off another OS as incapable.

Hell there is even a media center edition!
 

macbrooke

macrumors regular
Jun 21, 2006
138
0
Toronto, Ontario!
I run 13-14 apps at any given time on this thing..
Its only a G3..expose is my friend.
My Xp notebook would freeze way before that.. and leave me so pissed off I wanted to chuck it out the window! really!
I dont pretend to understand all the intracacies that make Mac what it is .. but I just know one thing it works.

Oh yes.. and these computers actually wake up from hibernation.. unlike another certain computer I own.. and I dont have to shut the thing down 4 times to get something to run right.
 

exabytes18

macrumors 6502
Jun 14, 2006
287
0
Suburb of Chicago
JFreak said:
Yep, and the answer is: 15 minutes.

Does this only happen when there is an extreme demand for RAM?

JFreak said:
Only that the current memory management system is still somewhat similar, and having gigabytes of memory in a windows system is really not useful.

Mmmmhhhhmmm. Yep, I didn't notice one bit (Pun!) going from 512 to 1024 MB of RAM. /Sarcasm

Also, are you suggesting that 1 gigabyte of RAM is all that Windows is capable of utilizing?
 

risc

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2004
2,756
0
Melbourne, Australia
JFreak said:
"Every" is a dangerous word. Use it and you're "always" wrong ;)

LMFAO okay how about I swap every to currently supported OSes. Or OSes made this decade... actually how about this century? :rolleyes:

By the way how good was that DOS machine at multitasking?
 

risc

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2004
2,756
0
Melbourne, Australia
JFreak said:
Actually, whenever you try to do anything media-related with Windows, you're in a deep trouble. Windows XP has been built on top of Windows NT kernel which is TERRIBLE on multimedia..

Wow my Windows XP MCE 2005 box would have to disagree with you there! It seems to handle multimedia very well. Sure the rest of the OS sucks but there is nothing wrong with media support.
 

Killyp

macrumors 68040
Jun 14, 2006
3,859
7
bigrell486 said:
How could you! Thats $129 in lost revenue! :eek:
No, I actually did the same for OS 10.3 last summer after 10.4 was released. Took me 2 weeks to download on a 56K modem that was connected for about 18 hours a day.


That aint an actual OS X 10.4 download! :D :D :D :D It's one of the system updates! I'm removing the extra keyboard languages...
 

63dot

macrumors 603
Jun 12, 2006
5,269
339
norcal
JFreak said:
Actually, whenever you try to do anything media-related with Windows, you're in a deep trouble. Windows XP has been built on top of Windows NT kernel which is TERRIBLE on multimedia. Every time Microsoft has introduced new multimedia-features, they have had to break kernel a little bit more. The best NT-kernel is NT4 with service pack 3, and that's IMO the most stable and the fastest Windows ever.

But it sucks at multimedia.

the NT kernel was meant to be stable for office apps and to conform with level two DoD security protocols...so it did that better than windows 95/98, which were better at multimedia but not at security

2000 added some multimedia capability to the NT kernel and windows 2000 was originally meant to be called NT 5.0, but still lagged behind os x on multimedia

xp yet added some more multimedia capability and in some ways, resembled os x, but os x still has the advantage...but for most users of both, like me, i notice very little difference

we can at least probably all agree that it's a good thing that os 9 and windows 98 don't rule the operating system landscape anymore ;)
 

fradac

macrumors regular
Oct 24, 2003
127
0
Atlanta, GA
hehe, i like this thread, here is my contribution.

runnings CS2 suit, some macromedia apps and all of ilife and more.

what amazes me is not that it can run all this, but the fact that the system is still usable, i am posting this while everything is running :)
 

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