Digital BW, The Print

Julian,

I have a G4 titanium dualboot with OSX/MacOS 9.2 and a
Win 2000 PC at home.

I have worked several years for Apple as a programmer and
consultant and also have been a programmer and consultant
on PC systems for serveral years.

I have had the two platforms since I started with computers
20 years ago.

I am Mac fan. Mac Os is easier to use and to fix and more
elegant in almost every aspect than PC systems. OSX is spectacular.
Apple hardware design is amazing. Those guys set the trends
in personal computing.

But the reality is MacOS 9 is an unstable system, it crashes
or freezes easely, you have to reboot often.
OSX is the cure Apple has como out for this instability,
it is a very robust system based on BSD Unix, it has greater
memory managment, great multitasking, elegant an easy to use
interface but... is not mature enought for what you need.
It does not have the miryad of native apps that Windows
systems have. Photoshop does not run native for example.
You have to run it on emulation. That means slower startup
and slower performance. Or Explorer, a native app, is slower
and less stable than Explorer on the PC. It is not ready
for prime time yet.

IMHO Win 2000 Professional is the way to go if you want a
robust and mature system with lots of applications.

It is very similar to Windows 98 for the end user. And almost
all 95/98/ME apps are compatible with 2000. The internals
are a very different thing than 98/ME. This is a system
similar to Unix. Great multitasking, it has protected memory
(that means that if an application crashes it does not crash all
the system and you don't have to reboot), great memory managment,
better device management and plug&play (less conflicts between
devices, easier to install peripherals and cards), faster overall
performance compared to 95/98/ME. And compared to MacOS it is faster
than MacOS 9 and the current version of OSX. There is also the hardware
issues. You have a lot more hardware options than with the Mac and
a lot cheaper. Drawbacks: more technical system and needs more
Ram but this is not an issue, Ram is very cheap this days.

I use the same tools a you. Photoshop FLIES, VuesScan works
great. Multitasking is impressive. You can print a huge picture,
have PhotoShop opened, connect to the Internet, open Explorer
and Outlook, look for e-mail, surf the web with several Explorer
sessions opened, have Vuescan opened (memory hog), and you do not
notice any performance degradation.
And what is very important to me is that I have NEVER seen a
blue screen of death. It has never crashed. This thing is
rock solid.

XP is in fact Windows 2000 with a new user interface and
several improvements. The internals of XP are almost identical
to Windows 2000. So XP is even a more impressive system
than Windows 2000. The only problem I see in XP is Microsoft
control. But for users of windows apps this is the future
that Microsoft has prepared for us...

My recommendation, keep in the Windows platform. That is what
you have learned. If you switch to Mac you will have to learn a new OS,
buy new hard, new software, install new drivers to connect your peripherals
and spend time so everything works... If you keep your PC you only
have to upgrade to Windows 2000. That's it and you will have a better PC. 

Jose Luis Martinez
Barcelona - Spain

I always thought that the main reason for chosing a MAC over a PC was 
colour management ar OS level with Colorsync.  That reason has less 
force now that Windows is more ICC colour aware.  

I use Windows 2000, which is exceptionally stable - no OS crashes at 
all.  I use MAC OS 8.6 to run a Dicomed scan back on a Powerbook, and 
I love the look of the latest MAC offerings, but I could not justify 
the learning curve and expense of a complete switch to MACs now.
--
Quentin

Its the Season to be Jolly,
Tra la la la la.....la,la,la,la.
Pints of Guinness, boughs of Holly.

Tra la la la la.....la,la,la,la.

ooops, I think I am on the wrong Platform!

Can someone point me to my homeward bound train?

Santa.