Sold out for osx and wow

[Oliver]

I used Mac a lot from 68k to G2.  Always thought they should be much faster for the hardware they were packing though, cause my 1200 is still way more responsive than my Power Tower G2, and just much better to use, despite the uglier standard interface (just using 1084s).  The new macs are pretty sweet, and the second hand G3's are really cheap now.  I also want to buy one when I graduate.

I would like to know, how do you 'feel' the responsiveness is with the G3 and OSX?  Does it feel as good as the old Amigas, or does it still suffer the feeling of bloatware?  I still use win98, cause it's less of a resource hog than XP, but getting too outdated.

-Oli

[Oliver]

Karlos wrote:
If it is a problem with the machine than that says it all. This is a completely "out of the box" eMac with the OS that shipped with it. Just as the server was an out of the box G4 workstation with nothing but OS X Server.

;-)

I don't know about Tiger, but when I used OS9 and below, the out of the box installation was always pretty bad.  It would install a lot of rubbish that one didn't need or want, even when one specified that particular components should not be installed.  I always used to do a LOT of customisation of any MacOS installation.  Much pruning, and rearranging, and use of a good de-fragger (this all made a big difference to performance for me).  I don't have much faith in OS installers, and unfortunately, Mac documentation isn't always very helpful for anyone who wants to do any system customisation (well, I think everyone knows that's a weak point in MacOS, but not their target market).  Some of the bad response times reported here sound like my crump old macs.  From having played with macs somewhat in my local puter shop over the years, I would expect better.  You may well be able to tweak your performance somewhat.

[Oliver]

@Karlos

Well, yeah, one would have thought so.  Up until about system 6, I was generally pretty happy in macland, but OS's just started growing out of control.  I love to blast windows as much as the next guy, but I actually have preferred using it to systems 7,8,9.

At uni, we had some imacs in a library cafe, as a net bar, and I could type several words in advance of the letters appearing on the screen (I'm also not much of a typist by the way).  What the hell were those things doing???  Admitedly, I think they must have been set up really badly, but why couldn't the software show what you type prior to doing whatever (I don't know what) was keeping the CPU so busy?  Talk about wanting to punch a compter (or at least some engineer).

Anyway, at least mac has done a good marketing job, unlike some other company which shall remain nameless.  As an engineer however, I so often find it grating when business and human factors come in the way of success of good design.  sigh.

I had hoped that the *nix based code would have made macos a lot more efficent.  Multi GB installs just fail to impress.

[Oliver]

hmm, thinking about Apple's maketing strategy of the past 5 years or so, which has focussed somewhat on the 'hairdresser' market (please, I really don't mean to offend anyone, honest), having out of the box installations that hamstring performance really does seem to be a bit of a dull move.  Really good way to annoy and befuddle one's customers.

[Oliver]

@vic20owner

That's good to hear.  Interestingly mixed results from the other users though.  Do you have any ideas why that would be?

[Oliver]

Does anyone else think it's a but daft to include EVERY printer driver in a basic installation, just in case you happen to use one of them?  Does anyone change printers so often that this becomes a really good feature, and well worth the disk space, installation time, ....
In OSX, does any of this 'just in case' installation end up occupying RAM?  I know it did in OS 8.  I had assumed that Apple would have improved matters somewhat for their 10'th gen OS.  Is this the case?