I am hooked part 2

For a week I am working now with my new Mac Mini from Apple. Parallel to the Mac I use still my windows PC. The reason is that I still have some Windows based programs for working in 3D, and some other stuff. Some things came to my attention, some real significant differences in performance and ease of use.

I work with PC's since 1993 and I can describe myself as a heavy user. I know all the little tweaks and backdoors to make Windows run smoothly. I worked with Win 3.1, 95, 98, Windows ME, XP Home and XP Pro. So I am pretty much familiar with the stuff. But you see there starts the problem. Working with Windows is actually asking the user to know the tweaks and backdoors to make things work.

 

Anyway, my last install of XP Pro, I did a near 5 months ago. I run also Panda protection for firewall and virus scan. It also deals with all the other things like pop-ups etc. It never worked smoothly. I always had some firewall problem, or loosing connection to the net. It also slows down the use of browsers and mail. And believe me, Panda deals even better with it then Norton. Norton steals a lot of your computers resources. Anyway, some things came to my attention and here they are.

1. Startup time of the Mac is a fraction of the time the Windows machine needs. 25 seconds is about it, while the PC needs about 4 minutes. 

2. While working on the PC I get all kinds of annoying messages, about latest updates and ready to install, firewall down, thread because the virus program crashed and needs a restart, about secure pages that are to be opened and I have to confirm. With the Mac I had nothing like this at all. I did one check on updates myself and they were fast installed in the background. Any new program I install has to be confirmed with a password. Something I really like because it gives me total control. 

3. Problems: The windows machine crashes regularly, something that is going on for a year now and reinstalling Windows didn't solve the problem. Sometimes when I close the PC he will even startup again. The error I get is vague and even Microsoft can't give a satisfying reason for the problem. Furthermore my PC can go get busy with some disk activity while I run no programs, using a lot of resources. It's hard to figure out what he is doing and why. None of these problems so far with the Mac, no crashes no bad things. Though it's a new machine and a clean sheet, the problems described with the PC also occurred also after a clean install.

4. Networking. I tried before with the Windows PC to share disks and folders with a laptop that was hooked up thru a network hub. Sometimes it would work but mostly it didn't. There was no solutions to make it work consequently. Because I have many files on the Windows PC I thought I give it a try to share the disks with the Mac. But I wasn't expecting it to work flawless. To my surprise it works totally without problems. Whenever the Windows PC is on, I see it appear in the Finder of the Mac. It gives me total freedom in working shifting files from one to the other.

5. Overall performance, it runs smooth and beautiful. I couldn't install Aperture from Apple because the Video board on the Mac is not sufficient for this program. But that is more the choice of having a cheaper Mac. Graphics are smooth and the operating system works totally instinctively and I did adept really fast to this new environment.  It works totally logic and I feel really more familiar and secure with the Mac OS interface.

Some extra's. I discovered that the in and outlet for audio contain also an optical connection. In the beginning I was really puzzled about it. I mean from my own conditioning I couldn't believe that it would contain different interfaces. This is true innovation. All that is needed is a optical fiber cable that you can buy at any audio store and a small special adapter. The sound is remarkable and it also puts surround and DTS when watching DVD. 

These are my first findings on working with the Mac. Over time I will probably find some flaws. One thing I discovered was that you can't use a microphone directly on the Mac. It's not something that is the first to notice, and in the beginning I thought that my Mac already was broken. But Google was very  helpful. It turned out that the mike needs it's own amplifier. So I found this nifty little device called iMic that amplifies thru USB. It has in and outlet for headphones and mike. Thus creating even an extra in and outlet and gives me freedom to use the optical port for my Aiwa computer speakers. Besides that the iMic can also be used to hook up your old recorplayer and turn those valuable records into mp3. Until now I am really enthusiastic. In the next weeks I plan to work on different websites and movies. I am curious how the overall performance will be. My creational fire started burning again. I keep you posted.