Digital BW, The Print

There is no Mac/PC war. That ended long ago. PC controls the general market
and Mac controls a very loyal but small niche market. The two problems with
a niche market are pricing and availability of software. As a business
necessity, software manufacturing generally shoots for the larger market and
fills the niche market if the demand warrants it. That is simple business
survival. Secondly, a lower volume in a niche market creates unreasonably
high pricing because of the captive audience. Having owned both platforms,
the most inconvenient experience was software availability for my Mac
systems. When upgrade decisions approached it became a matter of
practicality to look towards the available PC systems. The one experiment
that I have not tried has been with the dual platform Mac systems. Apple did
recognize the handicap which they were fighting regarding software and made
an effort to compete in that arena. Sadly, they did nothing about pricing.

Regarding Vista, Windows 7 has been announced for October of this year and
early beta testing has shown a lot of promise. I would expect that sometime
later this summer, if you purchase a system with Vista onboard, you will be
offered a reasonable , if not free upgrade. Otherwise, people would not buy
a system until 7 arrived. We run both XP Pro and Vista Business here and
Microsoft is advising that they plan to discontinue XP support in the near
future. Furthermore, XP is limited in the amount of RAM that it recognizes
and you will hit the wall at about 3gigs. I hope some of this helps you.

 

From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Tom
Fielder
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 11:05 AM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] Re:New Computer Advice

 






Lou -

I struggle with the same issues. First, before the Mac war lights up - I
have both Macs and PC's. I keep the PCs a/ because of specialized software
in my industry and b/ because I have a load of older PC software that works
well for my business. Macs are great - especially for graphics and
usability but if you want to retain the PC software that eliminates the Mac.
Second, do NOT get a Vista machine. They are a disaster. You can still
have XP Pro machines custom made or order XP Pro machines from Dell and
others. The XP Pro is available in 64 bit which will allow more memory and
greater speed. However, you may not be able to use all of the older
software on the 64 bit XP. That leaves the 32 bit XP Pro as the only
alternative for a machine that will reliably use older PC based software.
Get the fastest processor that you can afford; the largest hard drive you
can find, an external hard drive for backup; a dual video card with the most
on-board memory you can afford; and 4 GB (max) of RAM. The 32 bit XP can
only read a little over 3 GB of the RAM.

Tom

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