Don’t believe those MAC ads…

May 22nd, 2008 by steve

Last night while watching TV we all laughed at the MAC ad where the nerdy Windows guy is playing the blues.

After it aired, I said to Tim, “Do you have trouble with Vista?” Now, before you read his answer, understand he uses his PC hard. He’s just completed his sophomore year at Taylor University with a major in Computer Engineering. He pushes the machine hard.

His answer, “No.” That says it well. The ads are hype. The truth is short and sweet. Sure, Vista messes up sometimes. All computers do. Even DOS would crash if WordPerfect 4.2 tried to autosave at the same time you selected spell-checking. Even Linux has glitches (though it’s a very solid system). But would you call these “problems”? I didn’t when Win98 was causing my PC to perform illegal operations. Why would I be troubled now? Had problems with Vista? No.

Neither do I. In fact, Vista handles some things better than did XP Professional.

  • Vista handles the two-dozen windows I open when I open Quickverse better than XP does.
  • Vista handles document recovery better than XP did after a crash.
  • Vista handles networking better in a public environment. I never worry about whether someone is looking at my shared folder when I am in a hotel or other place on wifi.
  • The Vista presentation is superior as well. I love clicking the Windows Button (old start button) and typing what I am looking for.
  • And I’ve never seen a core-dump in Vista.
  • I’ve never seen the blue-screen of death in Vista.
  • I’ve never seen the gray-screen of…. whatever that is when the MAC in my house won’t boot.

Still, people are believing the ads. They are sticking with XP like some dolts stuck with DOS in the early 90’s. And the MACS that these ads are selling…. Wow.

Truth in advertising. Don’t you believe it.

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4 Responses to “Don’t believe those MAC ads…”

  1. alacy Says:

    I pretty much have to stay in the windows environment, there is no choice at work, and I prefer the environment on my home machine to match work. But that being said, XP has proven to be very stable at least compared to previous versions of windows. By memory because I don’t record it, I think I see an XP Blue screen of death about once every 6-8 months. Whereas I think with Win 95 it averaged about once a day. That isn’t to say that it crashed once a day, some days had no crashes others had 3+ crashes. But I didn’t go to XP until the first service pack was out.

    As for Vista, that is coming at work, for home, I am not sure I have enough horsepower. Robert’s “put” Vista on his laptop, but he did it by getting another hard drive. He has one with XP, and a different one with Vista.

    Now what is ironic, is 15 years ago at work I had OS/2. I never saw OS/2 itself crash. When an application program messed up, OS/2 saw it, shut down the application then displayed a cryptic screen with information about the crashed application. I hit enter and OS/2 and all the other applications were still running. This was during the time of Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, which would crash repeatedly during a day.

  2. steve Says:

    Years ago I used a program called DESQview.

    It handled multiple DOS sessions well. In fact, I actually ran Windows 2.n in a window in DESQview — just because I could 😉

    Were it not for its lack of graphical appeal, it could have been a contender. But then again, Symantec bought it and killed it, like they did with so many other products.

  3. alacy Says:

    During the time that the work computer had OS/2 my home computer had DESQview. At that time all the programs that I run at home were DOS based, and DESQview handled multiple DOS windows without a problem. Where as Windows 3.X would run windows applications ok (just a few crashes), it had major problems handling multiple DOS programs. It would almost always crash if there was more than one DOS application running.

  4. Ken Says:

    I can’t believe the people falling for the Crapple ads. Someone please show me as OS that doesn’t have an issue now and then.

    I love Vista. I’ve used it for about a year now and never have any issues with it.