WinXP and OS X

[kalantna]

Ok so I've had the chance to play around with my Dell Dimension 8300. I thought I might share impressions with everyone about this machine as it stands against my other two. I hope to make this as impartial as possible.

First, is the amount of time that it takes for the startup scripts to load (before the login screen). The Dell running a 2.66 ghz processor finished this task in about 45 seconds. It should be said that aside from the speed compared to the macs (running G4 800 mhz on both) there are no where near the amount of programs installed on the Dell as there are on the TiBook and the iMac. The iMac takes about 1 min and 10 secs, while the TiBook takes a whopping 2 minutes.

Logging in on the Dell and the iMac takes about the same amount of time while the TiBook takes easily twice as long.

Network connection is won by the iMac because it's on a T3 LAN and is always connected. At home the TiBook wins for the speed because for whatever reason the Dell takes almost 1 minute to finish its scripting to allow me to launch the connection window to my DSL service.

I don't know whether these results would change if I added additional RAM to the Dell, but I have come to the decision that the TiBook needs a reformat and a system reinstall.

Please feel free to post comments.

[symphonix]

The iMac takes about 1 min and 10 secs, while the TiBook takes a whopping 2 minutes.

The simple answer to this is ... just don't turn it off. Unlike a PC, a Mac can sit comfortably in its sleep mode and draw next to no power. I never turn my iBook off, and I take it with me everywhere. The only time I'd shut down a Mac desktop is if I needed to unplug it.

I don't know whether these results would change if I added additional RAM to the Dell, but I have come to the decision that the TiBook needs a reformat and a system reinstall.

Before you go that far, you might try running a "Repair Disk Permissions" (boot from the Mac OS X CD and open Disk Utility from the Installer menu), as this seems to help.

[Cat]

The simple answer to this is ... just don't turn it off. Unlike a PC, a Mac can sit comfortably in its sleep mode and draw next to no power. I never turn my iBook off, and I take it with me everywhere. The only time I'd shut down a Mac desktop is if I needed to unplug it.

Indeed: I just reboot for system updates. However, your system should start up faster ... repairing permissions could solve the problem ... a clean install may also speed things up ...

Speed depends on many things: processor, FSB, Harddisk, and of course system software. It's very hard to do honest cross-platform comparisons, but you can try to check how your system does compare to similar configured macs with x-bench. While not absolutely reliable or perfect, there are a lot who use it to to compare their performance with others and see whether ther is something blatantly wrong with their speed.

http://xbench.com/

[binaryDigit]

Originally posted by kalantna
...
First, is the amount of time that it takes for the startup scripts to load (before the login screen). The Dell running a 2.66 ghz processor finished this task in about 45 seconds. It should be said that aside from the speed compared to the macs (running G4 800 mhz on both) there are no where near the amount of programs installed on the Dell as there are on the TiBook and the iMac. The iMac takes about 1 min and 10 secs, while the TiBook takes a whopping 2 minutes
...

Remember that the time it takes to boot is very dependant on the hardware you have installed. Not the speed, just the number and type. Part of the time is taken up by doing checks on the various hardware bits. File systems are checked (so the more you have, the longer it takes), networks are started up, etc. When you're trying to compare times, be sure to factor such things in.

Originally posted by symphonix
The simple answer to this is ... just don't turn it off. Unlike a PC, a Mac can sit comfortably in its sleep mode and draw next to no power. I never turn my iBook off, and I take it with me everywhere. The only time I'd shut down a Mac desktop is if I needed to unplug it.

My 2 Win2k box's at home do the suspend thing just fine. It takes a bit to wake up on my primary box, but that's because I have two external scsi cdroms and two internal scsi drives and they all take a while to spin up. The other box comes up in just a few seconds, both never get turned off either. My wifes Dell laptop also suspends fine (Win98), but I just assume that any laptop would be much more likely to successfully suspend vs a desktop. Now I haven't actually measured the power usage during suspend modes, so it may be that the Macs do draw less, but I can't say for sure. But the functionality does seem to work.

[ksv]

The PowerBook boots slowly because of its slow hard drive - it's only 4200 rpm unless it's the high-end BTO option with 5400 rpm drive. Install OS X on an external drive, and boot from it on both the iMac and PowerBook, and you'll see they come out pretty equal

[lurk]

Originally posted by ksv
The PowerBook boots slowly because of its slow hard drive - it's only 4200 rpm unless it's the high-end BTO option with 5400 rpm drive. Install OS X on an external drive, and boot from it on both the iMac and PowerBook, and you'll see they come out pretty equal

This is so true I have a 667mhz TiBook and I run it off of an 10000 rpm external firewire drive and it flies. When I first set it up this way it was almost like getting a new computer ;-)

-Eric

[kalantna]

Thanks to everyone who has posted.

Last night I was reminded why it is that I love the Mac so much. After NWN crashed on me for the upteenth time the entire XP OS decided that it didn't want to play ball either.