On Sep 9, 2004, at 1:24 PM, Julia Thompson wrote:
Depends what you do. What do you do?
I run multiple e-mail programs at once and have more browser windows open than my husband thinks is reasonable.
Hmm! Well, how many is that?
I also want to be using genealogy software while I have a ton of browser windows open, but I don't have anything of recent vintage and so have no idea what sort of requirements that's going to add to the mess.
Can't advise there, since I've never run genealogy software of any kind. As far as multiple windows goes, I had an old NT box set up with a virtual desktop manager with 9 displays, and didn't have significant issues at all (ca. 1998-1999). 1 GB RAM was more than sufficient. (And I have a similar setup now on OSX; there's nothing like having multiple desktops!)
Occasionally throw kedit and EXCEL into the mix, as well.
Excel might be a pig for RAM now -- IIRC it's in the Office suite and could (might! not will!) hog more resources than is strictly necessary. I think you can find some decent clones of it open source -- try openoffice.org, for instance.
Oh, and the Palm desktop -- that's crucial. (I can't get anything done without my brain extension.)
There used to be some 'nix hacks of the Palm Desktop apps, but it's been quite a long time since I've looked into those. The ones I saw before were quite rudimentary, so I'd hope there's been considerable improvement.
It sounds, very roughly, like a lot of what you're doing is not going to be engineering style, silicon-intensive work, which makes me think you'd probably be pretty satisfied with WinXP. Of the Windows packages I've seen, it sucks the least.
Now you could take a plunge. eMacs are available for $800; that's a self-contained G4 machine with the display built in. You should be able to get roughly equivalent software functionality, but with infinitely less viral threat (there are no OSX viruses) plus a kernel designed around BSD, which opens the door to stacks of nice open-source stuff.
Again, it depends on what you want to do. Some people are so OS dependent that they literally cannot make a transition; some are just interested in getting the most bang for the buck and hang the platform. If you're doing DTP or graphics you might lean to Mac; if you're doing general computery stuff either platform should be fine.
-- WthmO
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