As the only Mac-owning member of Shopper's editorial staff, I've had to put up with a lot of mocking for my choice of personal computer. Unlike the legions of rabid Mac fanatics that lurk in forums and newsgroups across the internet, I don't feel the need to defend my choice since I'm not some sort of diehard. After all, I greatly prefer my Vista Media Center PC to my Apple TV when watching movies and TV shows on my HD TV.
I therefore read Dave Ludlow's post about why he hates Macs with a great deal of amusement.
I could respond to his post point-by-point but it's nearly the weekend so I can't be bothered. I do wish though that Mac-bashers would make the distinction between criticising Apple and criticising the products it makes.
I will also point out that many of the criticisms about the way Macs and the MacOS work are down to personal preference. Whether it's the traditional one-button mouse or having application-centric instead of window-centric windows management, it usually comes down to personal taste rather than an objective quantification of what is or isn't "better".
I'll end with an example of why I generally prefer Macs to Windows PCs. Dave's Windows Vista office PC takes a long time to boot up, which annoyed him greatly. However, he didn't want to leave it in Hibernation or Sleep mode overnight wasting electricity. He therefore built an energy efficient mini ITX PC (about the size of an Asus Eee Box) that is left on all night. At a preset time every morning, it sends a signal over the network to Dave's PC, telling it to boot up.
Although this is an impressive achievement, getting a Mac to turn on at a specific time of day is a lot easier. It's a simple series of options in a dialog box in the MacOS Energy Saver control panel:
In this case, the Mac's well thought-out design in integrating hardware and software has saved me a lot of hassle. Like building one computer to turn on another.
Alan Lu
2 comments:
In fact, the reason I get my PC to turn on a early, is so that it can start up and run a Norton Ghost backup before I get into the office. It also starts Outlook and runs our automated archiving. That way, my PC's all backed up and ready to go when I get into work.
Now, I could simply get my PC to power on automatically each day by using Task Scheduler to do the same thing, but this would use more power than turning my PC off.
There's an option in the BIOS to automatically power on the PC, too, but this is inflexible.
By using Wake-on-LAN (WoL) I can schedule exactly when I want my PC to start. The best thing is that the Mini-ITX computer is running LogMeIn, so I can remote control to that and either change the schedule or, if I'm coming in early, wake my work PC from home, so it's ready when I get in. It's useful at weekends, too, as I can wake my work computer and use its LogMeIn account to control it.
When I go on holiday, I can disable the wake-up automatically.
The Mini-ITX PC is also there running our Reviews Database application, so that freelance reviewers can fill out product specifications from home. All-in-all, while Windows can be slow to start, it's the jobs that I run on my PC every day that are the main culprits of a slow start. Using a low-power computer, that also has other jobs, means that my PC is always ready when I need it, but switched off barely using any power when I don't. The Mini-ITX computer can easily be changed to wake up any other computer (PC and MAC) in the building, so we could all wave goodbye to standby.
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