So I'm finally considering getting a MacPro. I'm a long time XP user, grew up using windows. I openly recognize the flaws of Windows and also of Mac, but I'm currently using a MBP and like the simplicity of it. I want to use my MacPro mainly as just a processing computer, nothing really else. I'll keep a small XP machine for the business stuff (books, contact management, word processing, etc).
So, to tip me over the edge, for those that have switched to Mac, what were the main advantages? What were some of the delightful surprises you encountered? What were some challenges?
My biggest concern is file sharing between the 2 machines. I'll probably set up a small SAN that contains all my files, of which each computer will connect via network to access and or edit. That was the biggest problem I was never able to fix on the MBP, being able to read the files which currently reside on my PC.
Sharing files is quite easy, do you have sharing enabled on your XP machines?
Unrelated to that, get yourself a (it's free) copy of Quicksilver, it really saves time. http://www.blacktree.com/
Macs aren't as magic as people make them out to be, I've run into plenty of bugs and annoying quirks, just lke XP. But one thing that Mac has over XP is its ability to multitask. I can have Photoshop, InDesign, Lightroom, Entourage, iTunes, and Firefox open at the same time, and not even realize it. That's probably the main reason I like Macs.
Matrix wrote:
But one thing that Mac has over XP is its ability to multitask. I can have Photoshop, InDesign, Lightroom, Entourage, iTunes, and Firefox open at the same time, and not even realize it. That's probably the main reason I like Macs.
Just a clarification... Mac OS is a recent newcomer to the world of multitasking (since OS X came out). I think you may be referring to memory management.
Since my server died I have been using the still functioning drive array as a NAS which will soon be replaced by a modern/larger capacity/cheaper to run solution. Since it's a pain to have the server running 24/7 just to facilitate file serving on the drive array, for quick solutions I just share a partition on a larger SATA drive running on a W2K machine which is the one windows machine that runs 24/7. I have no trouble accessing the files with the macs. Under the "go" tab you need to specify the ip of the machine and type in your credentials and thats it.
It's no trouble accessing files on a windows machine from a mac.
A network aware storage system is a good idea and these days getting super cheap compared to what we had to pay in the older days for this type of storage and redundancy.
Spencer - I bought my MBP last November with Tiger and upgraded to Leopard. Leopard was a big mistake in that it broke a lot of the things you're asking about. Recent patches have addressed most of the annoying things. My biggest beef was that they broke file sharing. Now it gets a bit complicated. Normally you connect to a server (attach a network drive) and it appears on your desktop and can be opened in Finder (like file Explorer). When Leopard came out it all acted the same but you could no longer see the attached drives in applications. This was huge for me because I keep my Lightroom catalogs on a shared folder on my Windows server. This has recently been fixed. Second issue is printing. I simply don't know how the pros do it. Number one is that Apple puts a bunch of crap GIMP printer drivers on the system that are absolutely useless for anything besides text. Drivers don't always install correctly. I was shocked to find out the standard "solution" is to delete the whole printers folder and try again. Apparently the Macs are susceptible to getting their wires crossed because everything is file oriented. Also according to Epson there are problems with ColorSync (Apples color management software) and they are "working with Apple" to fix these issues. I ended up using bootcamp to put windows on a second partition so I can print. But aside form those things the Macs are incredibly smooth and capable. Leopard is a true 64 bit OS so it can really handle having multile apps going with some real style and speed. Lightroom and Photoshop both seem more stable and faster under Mac OS/X. Applications are reasonably priced - their iWork is a whopping $80 and has most of the Office type functionality for the average user. Mail is somewhat substandard compared to Outlook but there are some really nice apps that come with the included iLife suite. Finally the MBP is an impressive machine from a hardware standpoint. I put Vista on my windows partition and ran the performance index. 4.9. I checked the machines at Best Buy and the best among them rated a 3.4 - most a 3.1. The MBP hauls butt. Be aware that Mac users criticize Windows for bogging down and needing periodic maintenance to keep running. Well Macs do too. They have a lot of AppleScripts that can be set up to run periodically to check disk file permissions and other stuff. Erroneous permissions and corrupt files seem to be a fairly common occurrence on the MAcs. I should explain - OS/X uses a plist file and some other stuff to keep track of permissions and configurations. I don't have it all figured out yet - but periodically I'll have access issues or something strange and I have to run the fixit scripts. No big deal aside from the fact "the Emperor has no clothes".. Are they worth it? I think I can say they are. Will they replace a Windows machine? Maybe - assuredly so with BootCamp. Do they really "Just Work"? Not entirely. Are they cool? You bet!
regards,
Jon
Thanks again Jon. I'm convinved that the Macs run smoother and a bit more stable, less hiccupping. But each has their flaws, more so to Windows. Just not sure if it's worth 2 times the price for a similar setup I could build myself.
Vista is a nice OS, but it's very RAM hungry. Once they get passed that issue, it might be better than XP. Still adjusting to Mac though.
I switched to Mac last September when I bought my MBP and couldn't be happier. Are there bugs? yeah. More than Vista? Not at all. More than XP? I'm not sure but nothing that stands out to make XP seem any better or less bug ridden. If you count Leopard as a release similar to XP or Vista then it is doing rather well. Most of the problems I have aren't with OS X at all but with some of the various 3rd party pieces of software and their minor annoyances. I feel that most of the problems you get results on google about have less to do with the OS and more to do with poorly coded 3rd party software.
The printing problem has been an issue for me as I also have a Mac Pro at work which is a windows office and all my printers are network printers. It actually worked until last week... not really sure what happened. I hope they fix it in 10.5.3 (or even in a small update) which shouldn't be too far away.
The ease of use and performance of both of my Macs is such that any switching pains are more than worth it IMO.
sboerup wrote:
Thanks again Jon. I'm convinved that the Macs run smoother and a bit more stable, less hiccupping. But each has their flaws, more so to Windows. Just not sure if it's worth 2 times the price for a similar setup I could build myself.
Vista is a nice OS, but it's very RAM hungry. Once they get passed that issue, it might be better than XP. Still adjusting to Mac though.
Hey I forgot to add that if you access an external drive using Fat32 sucks. Better to use NTFS. This is possible under OS X using MacFUSE which is an installable file system. Complete details on this Blog - essentially you install MacFUSE and then the NTFS-3G driver for NTFS. Works like a charm. I use Vista under bootcamp - I actually kinda like it, but I think I will put XP on shortly for various reasons. Only beef I have is that the Mac drivers for the trackpad are very twitchy under Vista - hard to right click on one file among many as it tends to try and scroll you before you can click. Wouldn't be such an issue if they'd put two mouse button on - but that's another rant....
Regards,
Jon
I switched to a Mac Pro last weekend. I have been a windows user for 10+ years. I've been getting ready for the switch for a month. A few weeks ago I bought two 1 TB HDs, one 150GB 10,000 RPM WD Raptor and four 2GB RAM cards from third party suppliers. My computer arrived on Wednesday last week where the only upgrades I got were the WiFi card, and extra superdrive, and the 8800 graphics card.
I am not a computer guy, I know very little about hardware, etc. Just enough to get by.
Before I added any hard drives or RAM I decided to bring the system up as it arrived. I plugged in the power cord, the display cord, the network cord and the keyboard cord. I turned on the machine. I filled out the registration information (5 minutes). And I was done. I fired up Safari internet browser. Works fine. I fired up email, entered my email address, my incoming server name and my outgoing server name, it works.
I notice my Windows machine is listed in the network so I go there and see all my images on all my shared HDs over on my Windows machine. Nice.
During initial setup I notice.... No antivirus software configuration, no signup trial for AOL, no automatic 90 day trail of this or that firing up and eating cpu, no extra crap coming up trying to get into my wallet. No bloatware. Beautiful. I still have some bloatware on my three year old system that I never figured out how to make go away.
Next I powered it down and added all the hard drives and all the RAM. Took about 15 minutes. The architecture of the system is beautiful and very easy to upgrade. I never even saw one cable or wire the whole time I was inside the machine. Very clean.
I turned the machine back on and it came up fine, complaining about the hard drives which are pre-formated for windows. So I use the disk utility and format the three drives. Done. I check my system info and see my total of 10Gs of RAM. Good.
Next part has me nervous. I want to move my whole boot drive, OS, etc. to my Raptor drive and boot from that. Back into disk utility I restore all the boot drive info to my Raptor. In sys pref I indicate the new boot drive as the Raptor. I shut down. I cross fingers. I power up. It boots! Yes! Good. Now. Did it really boot from Raptor. Not positive. So I do not want to format my original HD that was the boot. So I power down and remove it instead (takes 2 minutes). Power back up, it boots, yes! So I power down, put the drive back in and power back on. Once it is up I format the original drive and partition it for scratch, etc. for Photoshop. Everything is working fine.
I have never done anything like this before. Total time from unboxing to totally configuring it to this point was about an hour. I did not hit one problem. I did not have to look anything up or even use the help menu. I just poked around until I found what I needed. It was easy, logical.
I currently have Lightroom installed on it (on the raptor) but am waiting for my CS3 extended to arrive from Adobe. Once I get that I will run it through some paces to see how well it runs. Lightroom is lightning fast. I am hoping CS3 is reasonable as well.
In this current configuration the machine boots from a cold start to user ready in 23 seconds. Lightroom comes up to user ready from launch in about 8 seconds. A 100% render in LR of a 12.8 MP image takes about 3 seconds.
I am hesitant to compare to my Windows machine as it would be a bit of apples (no pun intended) to oranges. As my windows machine is 3 years old and maxed at 2GB of RAM. It is old. It is slow. I moved on. My decision to move to Mac is based on many things. I am happy with the decision.
"Next part has me nervous. I want to move my whole boot drive, OS, etc. to my Raptor drive and boot from that. Back into disk utility I restore all the boot drive info to my Raptor. In sys pref I indicate the new boot drive as the Raptor. I shut down. I cross fingers. I power up. It boots! Yes! Good. Now. Did it really boot from Raptor. Not positive. So I do not want to format my original HD that was the boot. So I power down and remove it instead (takes 2 minutes). Power back up, it boots, yes! So I power down, put the drive back in and power back on. Once it is up I format the original drive and partition it for scratch, etc. for Photoshop. Everything is working fine. "
You may want to rethink this move. Although the Raptor drive is faster, it is also limited in size. My boot drive (500 gig ) already has 200 gigs of program files.
Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this from a boot drive to a scratch. What all do you have installed? I have plans to have the OS, Lightroom and CS3... and maybe a few plugins, but that is all. This Mac Pro is intended to be my image crunch machine, that is all... I MAY add some version of windoze in the future but I plan on that being on a seperate drive altogether. I am keeping my Windoze machine with all it's software on it, mainly for my kids homework, so I will still have access to the occasional use of software over there.
The way I figure it is it was so easy to switch that if I want to change in the future it will be no big deal. For now I am enjoying the speed
I am a Graphic Designer and Photographer and have Photoshop CS3, Bridge, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro, QuarkXpress, Aperture, Corel Painter X, Microsoft Office, iWork 08, iLife 08, Roxio Toast Titanium, DPP, EOS software etc... I am currently using a second 500 GB drive for scratch and Aperture Vault and a 1 TB drive for Time Machine. I am thinking about getting the Raptor just for a scratch drive.
My old Windows machine just runs media center for my TV.
dermit wrote:
Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this from a boot drive to a scratch. What all do you have installed? I have plans to have the OS, Lightroom and CS3... and maybe a few plugins, but that is all. This Mac Pro is intended to be my image crunch machine, that is all... I MAY add some version of windoze in the future but I plan on that being on a seperate drive altogether. I am keeping my Windoze machine with all it's software on it, mainly for my kids homework, so I will still have access to the occasional use of software over there.
The way I figure it is it was so easy to switch that if I want to change in the future it will be no big deal. For now I am enjoying the speed ...Show more →
The new high capacity drives are nearly as fast as a Raptor for system disk usage. As a scratch disk the Raptor will be a bit faster. The 750GB drives are nearly the same price as a Raptor so cost isn't much of a factor. A 750GB Seagate 7200.11 as your system disk and the Raptor as scratch would be the best way to go. Plenty of room to grow, very fast and a quieter drive that gets the most action (if noise bothers you).
Fast external drive interfaces have changed the paridigm for computing. I recently faced the choice of replacing my aged Mac G4 tower with a G5 tower machine and realized I really didn't need a big noisy box to hold multiple disks and rack of cards because most of the same functionality was integrated into the iMac. At work we replaced most of the G5 towers the graphic designers were using with 24" iMacs.
I opted for 24" 2.8 GB iMac w. a 750GB internal drive for home. I pulled it in, went through the configuation help screens and it found and connected to my LinkSys wireless router. I had been storing my photos on an external FireWire drive and just unplugged it from the old machine and into the new one. I've since added a 1TB FW800 drive for backup with TimeMachine and changed my filing method, keeping all my working files on the internal 750GB drive so they will be automatically backed-up. The original external FW drive is used for secondary back-up and scratch disk.
Take a good look at the iMac. You might conclude you don't need the tower and save some money. Performance? Smokin'
For those who are new to Mac, let me make a suggestion: follow SOP when updating the Op System or doing Security updates, and for good measure, Quicktime and Java updates -- any update that requires a restart, which will be flagged in the Apple updater. That means unplug all peripherals, deactivate any haxies, do a Permissions Repair from the the Disk Utility in the Utilities Folder before running the update and then again after you've restarted. (If you really want to be thorough, as well as doing a Permissions Repair from within the start up drive, also do a Disk Repair by starting up from your boot disk holding down the 'C' key, and when the OS install window comes up go to the Disk Repair command in one of the menus at top and run Disk Repair--but NOT Permissions Repair from outside the normal startup drive. Then quit the Utility and Quit the Install program to restart.) And don't ever move applications out of the Applications folder or you're asking for trouble. This procedure isn't foolproof, but it heads off a lot of problems.
pjbishop wrote:
For those who are new to Mac, let me make a suggestion: follow SOP when updating the Op System or doing Security updates, and for good measure, Quicktime and Java updates -- any update that requires a restart, which will be flagged in the Apple updater. That means unplug all peripherals, deactivate any haxies, do a Permissions Repair from the the Disk Utility in the Utilities Folder before running the update and then again after you've restarted. (If you really want to be thorough, as well as doing a Permissions Repair from within the start up drive, also do a Disk Repair by starting up from your boot disk holding down the 'C' key, and when the OS install window comes up go to the Disk Repair command in one of the menus at top and run Disk Repair--but NOT Permissions Repair from outside the normal startup drive. Then quit the Utility and Quit the Install program to restart.) And don't ever move applications out of the Applications folder or you're asking for trouble. This procedure isn't foolproof, but it heads off a lot of problems....Show more →
UGH! Is this really Mac OS X SOP? If it is, wow, totally lame. That's a total pain in the arse. How is this any better than windows defrag/reg cleaning/boot into safemode, etc? I switched to a mac to avoid having to jump through hoops like this to use a computer.
I will just have to be happy editing on my MBP. 