Dissapointed so far

You are dead wrong about SCSI. It is not dead and is faster than the current drives that Apple ships. They are more expensive though and that is why Apple switched. People constantly bitched about how much more expensive Mac's were than PC's. One reason was SCSI. So Apple switched to the cheaper PC like ATA drives and people still are not satisfied. As a system Admin using Sun and HP servers all of our drives are SCSI and very expensive. You get what you pay for. Apple now make the SCSI drives an option.

Calliex
 
SCSI is great if you can afford it. Not long ago (before I switched to Macs), I was using a friend's PC which has an internal SCSI hard drive - P3/600, Windows 2000, 256MB of RAM, nothing special - and at this time I had a PC that is exactly the same as hers, sans SCSI HD. When I used her system is was definitely faster! Everything was more responsive. I was really impressed. However, her 10K Cheetah was loud as all Heck, and for the price she paid for the drive I got an ATA/66 with at least twice the capacity. So if you can afford it, sure it's great! But I think ATA is much better for 99% of the people out there - especially in terms of bang for buck.
 
I understand that I should have done research but why is this product which has been out of circulation from a manufacturer who has been dead for a while be supported in win2k and XP. Thats my point. If that SCSI card is supported there, I think OSX should have supported it. I'm sure all popular flavours of Linux on PC will support Qlogic based SCSI cards as well. My point is that I think support for chipsets should have been there.

Anyway SCSI is not dead. SCSI is by far the best improvement any system can get. Better than any cpu upgrade. If I had to choose between going IDE on my AMD box or dropping way down to a PIII 450 but keeping all my SCSI stuff, I'd rather do that. Having built hundreds of different desktops and servers, I can honestly say that SCSI drives and interface is worth the money.
 
SCSI is nowhere near dead! Expensive, reliable, blazing fast, but dead? Come on. That's like saying since most ordinary computer users use windows that UNIX is dead.

SCSI is the standard for servers, and high end computing due to its reliablility and speed. I have 3 SCSI drives (0 ide) in my PIII 450 MHz linux box, and it blows the socks off any of the 1+GHz machines I've used as far as running multiple applications, launching apps or running as a server.

IDE is nice for storing your mp3's and large files that don't have to be accessed often, and if you have a backup scheme they're usually fine for the every day joe user.

Until the clock speeds on processors get ALOT faster, and rpms of IDE get up around where scsi is now you won't come close to the performance of a SCSI based system. Maybe when that happens you'll see scsi give up the ghost, but of course by then they'll have Ultra Wide 640 or something with 30K RPM's :)

anyway.. that's my 2 cents
 
Just a comment in between. Someone said that Windows XP is bigger but also faster than Windows 98. This is simply not true. Usually, people are comparing this by remembering how Win98 was on an old box with how WinXP works on their new one, so... I can tell you that on both my PII/350 and a friend's P4/2.2 Windows 98 is faster in everything (even in crashing, of course). Windows XP and its UI _did_ cost a lot of processing power and memory, compared to Win98 at least, but the difference might be that the PCs have been sped up faster.

Yet, I have to add it, I'm fine with my TiBook 500. I'll buy a new one, as soon as I have the money, because it IS showing its age sometimes, but I'm still in a stage where I can absolutely do all of my work fine on the old little bugger and with speed on Mac OS X 10.2.3. The thousands of Swiss Francs have been a good investment for me, as I've never before had a notebook that lasted so long as my top machine.
 
I have swithed many clients from Win98/Me to Win2k/XP and both myself and the users feel the difference. Usually I'll get calls from the people that were hesitant to upgrade, telling me that its soooo much faster. Maybe this is partly due to the fact that its a new install...but in general I've noticed that win98 tends to drag its feet sometimes where win2k/xp doesnt seem to.
 
Originally posted by contoursvt
I have swithed many clients from Win98/Me to Win2k/XP and both myself and the users feel the difference. Usually I'll get calls from the people that were hesitant to upgrade, telling me that its soooo much faster. Maybe this is partly due to the fact that its a new install...but in general I've noticed that win98 tends to drag its feet sometimes where win2k/xp doesnt seem to.
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Them thinking Win2K/XP being faster than Win98 is purely psychological or they added more ram, a new faster hard disk, new faster graphics card, a new better soundcard or all of the above!

Or they already use a top of the line Wintel box which in order to show its real power MUST have a Win2K/XP installation...

And yes, the thing about fresh install also stands correct ;)
 
There is no way that WinXP or Win2k are "faster" than 98. Think about it, winXP's minimum requirements are like double that of 98, so you have half of a system left to do the same amount of work. I have owned 98 and 2k and I can tell you that 2k is the slower of the two on the same hardware. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either fooling themselves or is experiencing the joys of a clean install (windows gets slower over time a clean install will speed up your comp a bit).

Concerning start up times. How often do you reboot? Does startup time really matter? My windows 2k box (on a 1.8ghz athlon) takes over 2.5 minutes to boot. Oh no, OSX takes a while to boot too. If your friends XP boots in 30 seconds then either he wasn't booting (was waking up, yes pcs take atleast that long to come out of hibernation) or XP is roughly 5x faster at booting than 2k and seeing as they are built on the same code base I somehow doubt this. But hey, does it even matter? You shouldn't be rebooting much anyways on any "modern quality" OS...

and buying a new system without first checking compatibility is just goofy. When I bought win2k there were no drivers out for my joystick, but it had worked under windows 98SE. You wont hear stories about me running to the closest windows forum and complaining because I didn't. It was my fault I didn't check first, same thing applies here.

You want something to actully get done about it, email the hardware vendors and apple. Ranting in here probably wont make one ounce of change...
 
I could see how it would be useful for the Power Mac's.
Yet the external hard drives were a pain.

SCSI :plug in drive, turn on the computer, install driver's, restart, do work
FIREWIRE: Plug in, turn on computer(well let's assume it is always on), do work
Plus you can just eject it from the finder and unplug it without the computer telling you to shut down.

It's possible the switch campaign wouldn't pan out if scsi was still implemented. Consumers want ease of use, which describes firewire.
 
Well, I recently set up my own web development company (one employee and counting), and just so that I could make truly platform independent site, I went and bought myself an eMac. Prior to this purchase I was firmly in the FreeBSD camp for desktop, and hadve a linux server (my printer doesn't work with FreeBSD). I only ever start up windows for browser testing. Anyway, in the week since I've bought the eMac, I've moved all of my development over to it, and copied all of my mail, and calendar files across, too. My once precious laptop has now been reduced to being a DVD player to keep me amused while programming.

The reasons:

The main one (and I think the one which always attract people to the Mac) is that OS X looks drop dead georgeous. And the font smoothing makes it easy to sit there programming for hours on end without a hint of a headache.

The next one is that fact that all my open source tools (apache, perl, mysql, postgres, php, cvs, etc.) are only a download away, and they install brilliantly (apart from php which demanded a whole hour of my time - more my fault than php's).

As for the install taking so long, if you select the customise option, before clicking on install or upgrade, you can deselect all of the language variants you are not likely to use. This brought my install time down from a couple of hours to around half an hour.
 
As a current Windows user, i have upgraded my machine from 98 to XP, and the boot time has CONSIDERABLY increased. It probably takes around 30 seconds or less to start the computer...And for some reason when i upgraded, my "sleep" feature was lost, so i usually shut down the computer.

As for running faster, well, i can say it does run a few things a little faster than 98 did, but it's not that much of a change..

The only big reason i upgraded was for the stability. I crashed daily with 98...

Now, overall, i'm getting sick of windows and i'm considering the "apple switch".
 
IMO, SCSI should be dead. It may be alive and kicking on the high-end server market, but for uz consumerz it is the biggest computer-related pain in the ass I have ever had to deal with. Just look at the connections. Tell me you like that gigantic plug better than a small Firewire plug. I'll ask you what medication you are on. You can have your SCSI in your server and eat it too, but for the average Joe (and that's my real name), IDE/Firewire works far better than SCSI ever will. I can not see many families buying super-duper SCSI upgrade cards for their email computers.
 
Originally posted by Aeronyth
As a current Windows user, i have upgraded my machine from 98 to XP, and the boot time has CONSIDERABLY increased. It probably takes around 30 seconds or less to start the computer...And for some reason when i upgraded, my "sleep" feature was lost, so i usually shut down the computer.

As for running faster, well, i can say it does run a few things a little faster than 98 did, but it's not that much of a change..

The only big reason i upgraded was for the stability. I crashed daily with 98...

Now, overall, i'm getting sick of windows and i'm considering the "apple switch".
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Welcome to th real world... A few things you need to consider before making the Switch...

1. Since you have used Windows for quite a considerable amount of time... What was your primary purpose? (Games? Writing, Graphic editing etc?)

2. If you answer Games... Than you must consider this... Keep your Windows PC and consider it your Gaming PC... Only because Mac OS-X is still new and an infant to today's games etc.

3. If you go with the G4 Power Pc (Tower) consider memory as your ultimate upgrade... Mac Os X is a memory hog... but when you up your memory to about 1gig or more you will be happy of the performance increases..

4. I am only telling you this because I am an A+ Certified Tech.. (Means nothing unless you know the right people to get you the right job etc...) and I've been using Windows Machines since Windows 3.X... I am a "Switcher".. and I consider what I have done is a great move.

Any Questions... Ask.
 
Well, i really use my computer for internet and a FEW games.

Things in my quicklaunch: IE, MSN, WMP (eww), Photoshop, All Office programs, Furcadia (a online game that i can still play with this comp if i get a mac..), RealPlayer, ICQ, SimCity3000, The Sims, AIM and a few other useless things i need to delete.

MOST of those things are available on a Macintosh, and if there's something that i cant get i can probably run it with this computer.

(As for PC users being discouraged with Apple, there still IS a lack of general applications available for Mac. This is easily demonstrated by going to a store and looking through the software section... windows windows windows.)

For me getting a mac, i'm considering the iMac, or possibly the G4 tower. The G4 tower is available for pretty cheap now, but it's going to cost a little more than the iMac if i get a apple display.

Oh, BTW, i am only 15 and this would be my parents $$$, but we're going for <2000$. With that said, when i go to college i'll be buying my own computer(most likely a laptop) and my parents will keep the computer...so, i think i'm looking at the iMac.

Okay, i'm done rambling now.
 
one thing to say about firewire/usb vs. scsi - "plug and play". Not having this is what makes scsi obsolete for the average consumer. i have on several occasions lost proper drive recogniton for my externals. the only way to repair them is to launch the repair app and then plug them in. if they were scsi, i wouldn't be able to repair them, only to reformat and lose all the valuable files they contained. While i wasn't real thrilled with the initial cost of upgrading all peripherals to usb and firewire, i've considered it worth the investment ever since. of course, it also didn't take me long to figure out that usb devices are less than the best either and i now seek out firewire whenever possible and i can afford it. I'm still waiting for a decent affordable firewire scanner to appear.
 
Hey Arden, I will agree with external device being nicer and more convenient as firewire but I made not one reference to external devices. I said SCSI is not dead at all and mentioned high end servers and workstations. Internal SCSI drives are still way way faster than IDE drives and have the biggest impact on system responsiveness.

A 1Ghz P3 with 512MB RAM and a 15K SCSI drive will demolish a 2.53 or even 3Ghz P4 with a large IDE drive when it comes to how the system FEELS.

Also, the 'average' joe at home doesnt need ultrafast hard drives the same as they dont need ultrafast cpus. They are not power users and will probably not multitask a lot anyway. Also seeing that the best place to have SCSI is in a multitasking environment. I can talk about it until I'm blue in the face but people who have it and are running 10K and 15K drives know what I'm talking about. People who dont, will argue all kinds of points but it doesnt matter really. A dual 80gig 7200RPM IDE RAID system doesnt feel as nice to use as the 10K Atlas III drive in my secondary machine. I know because my friend runs the dual IDE RAID. It benchmarks fine but the system still falls on its face unless you limit what you do to only a few things at a time.

Basically I didnt buy a fast CPU and fast ram to be bottlenecked somewhere else. Consider also that firewire is still slower than a 4 year old U2W controller card (640mbit). An ultra160 is capable of 1280mbit and U320 is 2560mbit/sec. Couple that with the fact that inside that firewire box lies nothing more than a regular 7200RPM IDE drive, one wonders exactly what the big deal is. I guess its nice as a not so fast external solution. Convenient and decent enough. Like USB 2.0 I guess.
 
Originally posted by Aeronyth
Well, i really use my computer for internet and a FEW games.

Things in my quicklaunch: IE, MSN, WMP (eww), Photoshop, All Office programs, Furcadia (a online game that i can still play with this comp if i get a mac..), RealPlayer, ICQ, SimCity3000, The Sims, AIM and a few other useless things i need to delete.

MOST of those things are available on a Macintosh, and if there's something that i cant get i can probably run it with this computer.

(As for PC users being discouraged with Apple, there still IS a lack of general applications available for Mac. This is easily demonstrated by going to a store and looking through the software section... windows windows windows.)

For me getting a mac, i'm considering the iMac, or possibly the G4 tower. The G4 tower is available for pretty cheap now, but it's going to cost a little more than the iMac if i get a apple display.

Oh, BTW, i am only 15 and this would be my parents $$$, but we're going for <2000$. With that said, when i go to college i'll be buying my own computer(most likely a laptop) and my parents will keep the computer...so, i think i'm looking at the iMac.

Okay, i'm done rambling now.
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Good news is you can buy what is called a KVM switch... so if you still need your PC... You can use it buy using one monitor... but since your leaning toward an Imac... I say go for the 17inch display... it's a little more money... but well worth it on your eyes.
 
I don't think i'm even considering the 15 inch. The screen is ..TOO small. $1799 is a reasonable price, and i like the widescreen.
 
Originally posted by Aeronyth
I don't think i'm even considering the 15 inch. The screen is ..TOO small. $1799 is a reasonable price, and i like the widescreen.
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Ok but make sure you Max out the memory... OS X is a Memory Cruncher... Max it out... I did.
 
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