mac os X responsiveness?

sirsoriam · Sep 26th, 2007, 08:04 PM

hi!

first of all thanks for everyone on posting useful info for us canadians. I really like the concept of this board.

I am an old mac addict (used to own a 66mhz power mac) who was converted to the pc back in the day (the mac os x betas/os 9 switch got to me). now I know os x is stable but I have a few Qs.

I'm thinking of switching back to the mac mainly because I'm tired of windows. On os x does the os sometime seem "lost"? you know when you click on a menu in windows and he seem to be searching forever in the ram or something. I'm not talking about filters in photoshop and progress bars. More like when everything seem slow and the screen has trouble redrawing itself. and windows "hang". I have a dual core and 1 gig of ram and it's just ridiculous that xp and vista does that.

Also can you have a mac stay open for days and months? I have to reboot my pc every 3 days or so as the ram seem to be leaking. so at first it's fast and then it crawls... I'm a heavy duty users and i open and close Photoshop often and do lots of different task like programming, movies etc.

last Q: with a mac mini could i have ps cs3 open with msn, a bittorrent client and 3 firefox windows with like 15 tabs open? I know it's kind of heavy duty but my pc seem to slow down dramatically when i have all these aps open.

thanks for the honest answers. I'm pretty sure i'll switch anyway but i'm just wondering about the state of os x. everything seem to run fine at the apple store but then again so did my current pc at futureshop.

nothing like hands on heavy duty work to know of an OS' stability and problems..

thanks again guys!

jdurston · Sep 26th, 2007, 08:37 PM

I use a high end Dell Precision XP laptop for work and a MacBook at home, both are CoreDuo with 2GB of RAM.

My MacBook feels twice as fast even with it's "inferior" video card for almost every task. Multi-tasking seems to be very poorly implemented in Windows with one task being able to tie up the entire machine. I have no problem doing similar tasks to what you mentioned on my MacBook. I have been running the same install of OS X since last June(2006) (2 weeks after I purchased it). If anything it has gotten better with age like a good wine. I suspect as Apple optimized it's intel code. The only maintence I do is back up every other day with SuperDuper (not really maintenence but important non the less) and use iDefrag every other month or so. I do run Onyx and Cocktail at really sporadic intervals, but my computer seems to run great without much intervention.

I had a friend over who just built a killer gaming PC remarking at how snappy my MacBook felt compared to his XP desktop that is absolutly loaded with hardware.

As far as time between restarts goes, I generally only ever put the machine to sleep and only restart every couple of weeks when prompted to after installing some software or update. Some applications benefit from the occasional quit and restart (depending on how well they manage their RAM).

I often have Aperture, iPhoto, Mail, Word, Limewire/azureus, and a bunch of browser windows/tabs open simultaneausly without noticeable slow downs. The only thing that will slow it down seems to be intense HD activity which is limited by my 5400rpm laptop drive.

Pelao · Sep 26th, 2007, 09:25 PM

jdurston offers a good summary of what you can expect.

If you get a Mini just make sure it has lots of RAM and it will handle what you want.

I note that you will be using PS: if you have an external drive for backups, make a partition of it available to PS as a Scratch disc and this will help performance a bit too.

We have a 3 year old eMac here that hammers away merrily at all sorts of tasks: typically PS, Safari, Mail and MSN. Never an issue.

kockgunner · Sep 27th, 2007, 01:58 AM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by jdurston
	Multi-tasking seems to be very poorly implemented in Windows with one task being able to tie up the entire machine.

I agree entirely. In windows, if a simple thing like the recycle bin lags, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING lags with it. Heck, the task manager lags to (which I think is totally ridiculous). In OS X, should anything 'hang', it doesn't affect other programs. Plus, you don't have to wait a like 5 minutes to force quit anything.

jdurston · Sep 27th, 2007, 10:35 PM

If I was buying a Mini I would want to install a smaller internal 7200rpm 2.5" drive as a boot drive with my apps and keep my big files on a fast external firewire drive. It's too bad the Mini doesn't have an eSATA port. But a sweet machine never the less, the mini is all most people need in a desktop and it's a really nice package. Careful on the upgrades though, you can get into refurb iMac territory real quick.