O/t Home Pc Crashed - New Pc Or Imac?

[Dibby]

Here we go again, Apples are immune from malware and crashes and PCs are riddled with them - people trotting out that old chestnut from the early 90s still believing every word is true.

In truth, Apples can crash and there are virusses, trojans and spyware for Macs.

Nowadays it's more a choice of budget, lifestyle and application: What will you be using the computer for? Don't listen to what suits other people best. Do you need to spend the extra money for what you will get with a Mac? Are you bothered about what your friends think about what computer you own - do you wear a computer like a badge? If all you are going to be doing is surfing the net, word processing and spreadsheets, chances are the 6 year old hardware is still fine, a wipe and resinstall of Windows and you'll be up and running like it was new. Do you really need quad core processors with 8GB of RAM and a terrabyte of hard drive space if you're not going to use it?

[zvezdochka]

Thanks again for all the replies. Seems like the mac vs pc discussion could run for a long time!

Dibby - I agree that the current pc should be fixable, but currently it won't run for more than a few minutes before it shuts down and reboots. Processor and Motherboard are 6 years old but hard drive and dvd writer are more like 10 years old so I think they are on borrowed time. Going to need some investment soon.

[Dibby]

The PC vs Mac debate will continue as long as they sell them, don't bother asking the internet PC vs Mac? You'll get a load of 'Well I use this so it must be best for you'

To be honest, DVD writer technology hasn't changed much in the last 10 years, unless you need a Bluray drive in a PC you'll end up with the same technology under a newer label if you buy new. A whopper of a hard drive can be had for £50, memory is cheap as chips. Just have a think before you spend the cash (PC World and these places love to upsell) do you really need a Core i7 processor for an extra hundred quid to type the odd letter and surf the net when a Core i3 will do the job nicely?

Your existing PC could be full of fluff, over heating and shutting itself down. To try and eek it through the last few weeks and make data transfer to the new computer easier without it crashing, take the side off the case, unplug the memory stick(s), hard drives, power cables, take the fan off the processor heat sink ... basically, remove everything but the processor and wave the hoover over the top (careful not to touch anything or knock anything off the motherboard) to suck all the fluff out of the heatsink, fans, air intake and exhaust in the case, power supply unit and all the card and memory slots. Re-seat your cards, memory and power connectors. You could run memory/ cpu/ hard drive stress tests and look into the crash logs it wirites before rebooting to find out what's giving you jip ... but sometimes it's more hassle than it's worth.

'fixed' a mate's parent's crashing computer last week by hoovering the fluff out of it and it stopped chucking up blue screen errors.

[adamnreeves]

Macs just have sooo much better PR

Now they don't. If they did we'd all be using Macs now.

[adamnreeves]

Here we go again, Apples are immune from malware and crashes and PCs are riddled with them - people trotting out that old chestnut from the early 90s still believing every word is true.

In truth, Apples can crash and there are virusses, trojans and spyware for Macs.

When I say crash I was refering to the general stability of the operating system. Also a crash on a Mac is usually limited to the program or application you are running whereas Windows the whole operating system can be brought down by a malformed program. Why? Because on Mac a protected environment is set up for the application. I think I read somewhere that Windows does this now but I seem to see evidence that does not support this. I have had BSOD on my work's notebook which is running Windows7 Ultimate.

Microsoft seem to get their user base to do the testing for them. Viruses, Trojans and Spyware can affect any platform even smart cards. Just Windows is a much bigger and easier target.

It is only recently that Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to implement proper user access control, i.e. administration access to prevent unauthorised access by programs that can inadvertently be ran by the user or the web browser. This is why it was such a big target.

Unix and Linux and other variants have had proper user access control or the distinction between normal users and superusers built into the kernel for a very long time, certainly since I have been using them since the 1980s. Apple is based on BSD a variant of Unix.

Any operating system that does not have this control or in this case took 30years to implement obviously does not have it user base security interests held at any priority at all!!

For my home operating system I use Linux and this is my favourite operating system. I vote this as the most secure operating system. Currently running Ubuntu.

[Dibby]

Wouldn't recommend Ubuntu to Zvezdochka. It's all about what he needs his PC to do rather than what suits you and me.

Used it a bit in XBMC Live, Mythbuntu and Jolicloud guises myself but gave up after trying to get DTS-HD Master Audio signals through the HDMI port of my home theatre PC. It was nice for the basics of home computing but a bit limited unless you really know your onions on the coding to get things working properly.

[adamnreeves]

Wouldn't recommend Ubuntu to Zvezdochka. It's all about what he needs his PC to do rather than what suits you and me.

Used it a bit in XBMC Live, Mythbuntu and Jolicloud guises myself but gave up after trying to get DTS-HD Master Audio signals through the HDMI port of my home theatre PC. It was nice for the basics of home computing but a bit limited unless you really know your onions on the coding to get things working properly.

Yes, thread drift. Wasn't recommending Ubuntu for him just stating what I use. As I started my career in IT in the 80s a green blinking block waiting for input doesn't scare me. In fact even on Windows I have a command box waiting for me to type in commands manually rather than go to the respective control panel applet which seem to change every time a new release of windows is made available. I used to have a tool set of unix commands cross compiled to windows so that I could use commands like awk, grep, find, ls, vi

Yes one of weakness of Linux was multi-media support. Been a while since I've done any development in Linux in fact been a while since I done any low level programming. More application programming now.