Welcome Sanne,

For Games, I am still running around with Diablo II Lord of Destruction Expansion pack. Haven't had a chance to fully solve it. Runs well on my 333 Powerbook with OS X installed. Agree that Windoze has more games, but also more crashes among other quirks.

Come visit us more if you need help. See what we can do.

Christian

I use this system for all of that I've never in the past 5 years had more than 2 virus, one was from my own stupidity and the other was from kazaa, which i no longer use. IT is really hard to crash windows xp, you need to be trying to do it to make it actually BSOD now adays.

to tell you the truth i am running win 2000 at work here. and i have only crashed this machine a few times and those were my stupidity because i was coding some vb using some windows api's incorrectly and i killed some stuff. but other then that the only other time i ever crashed this thing was when i had hardware goin out on me. now this pc hasnt gone down in almost a year. and really the only time my xp home on my laptop ever crashed was when i was playing with shit. or when i was stupid and was using kazaa. i guess that dont matter know that i use linux at home. but this win2k machine is solid and so are all the pc's at my work and they are all running 2k or xp pro.

OS X just seems slower then XP. In Firefox, Safari, or even Camino, web pages take a few seconds to draw on the screen, and I "feel" the entire system lag.

Again, I'm not on a Dual G5 machine, but a 400mhz Celeron could render web pages smoother then my 867mhz G4. I have almost all of the quality settings off, and antialiasing is off for smaller fonts too.

It might just be that this is how OS X presents slowness LOL... I guess I'm used to the way Windows presents it.

I wonder why you had stability problems.....

Again folks, I don't have any stability problems on Windows machines. If you do, its due to inexperience or because of bad hardware - two things which can just as easily happen on a mac.

Tekmaven I had to comment on this thread as well.

I used G4's when I was in school and they seemed to crash and I had to do a cold boot. Now I think these machines only had 256MB ram and we ran Photoshop and stuff but with the same amount of ram on Windows XP it runs faster and does not lockup. And I am also a .NET Programmer but I think Windows XP myself performs better then Mac OS 9 and maybe OSX.

In my experience the vast majority of all problems people have with any OS and hardware are self-induced.

People overclock their systems, install unstable hacked beta drivers because someone told them those are faster, plug in hardware without reading the installation instructions (or not comprehending them when they do read them), and then blame Microsoft for making a bad product.

Apple has it easier in that respect in that they have far more control over the hardware their customers are running.
Linux also has it easier because it's mainly used by people with more knowhow as well as having a lot less hardware and application support overall and therefore less chance of users messing it up.

Personally the only OS crashes I've had since upgrading to Windows 2000 back in 1999 that weren't caused due to bugs in (usually) 3rd party applications were due to hardware problems (last weekend for example an overheating videocard that caused my PC to reset itself every few minutes, faulty power cable to the fan, can happen to any computer).

I've been thinking of getting me a Mac on the side, but a cheap one.
Not to become my main machine (doing development for Windows and modern Java versions not supported on Mac that's impossible even if I wanted to) but to play with (like my Linux box which is also to play with).
Thinking of either a used iMac (can get some reasonably cheap) or a new miniMac (but those are still too expensive for a plaything, especially considering I'd need to get a screen for it as well as a USB hub, keyboard and mouse (only leftover keyboard and mouse I have are DIN and serial respectively which just won't fit in a USB port no matter how hard I push).

Hello,

You might want to consider a Mac Laptop. Less desk space, and can give you the look and feel that you desire.

If you do not like OS X, you can consider YellowDogLinux, which is based on RedHat. It will work just fine on Apple hardware, and it does feel faster.

If you want to work with OS X, 333 Mhz, which is what I have, is about as slow as you want to go.

Christian

they're nice but more than I'm currently willing (or able) to spend on something that won't be my main machine but rather an experiment.

thought the Imacs would be rather too slow to be useful, after all why else are they being dumped in numbers