Don't forget that with a Mac you can also partition it to run either Windows or OS X and it usually runs Vista/Windows better than the PC's do. I just switched to a MacBook Pro after 20+years of PCs and thus far I'm very happy with the switch. I don't have the partition and I can still access most of my PC files without any conversions. However, there's a lot of software (GIS particularly) that's designed for PC's. You'd have to run a partition to gain access to it. Fortunately I still have a PC with XP on it to run GIS and a few other apps that aren't ported to the Mac.
It would take some transitioning to get used to the different file structures and the Mac quirks, but a lot of the stuff is really easy to use, much more so than Windows/Office. Just my 2 cents, Tim Dr. Tim Baker Forestry and Natural Resources College of the Redwoods 7351 Tompkins Hill Rd Eureka, CA 95501 -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news on behalf of Wirt Atmar Sent: Mon 8/11/2008 7:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] moving from a PC to a Mac??? Bill writes: > Scott is right, Vista is a good reason to move to a Mac. However I might > point out that PC makers are beginning to offer XP again. The high end Sony > Vaios actually come with both, including an optional "downgrade" from Vista > to XP, and I suspect that by the end of the year most suppliers will be > offering XP. > > So all is not lost. A PC with XP is a useful machine, a PC with Vista is > nothing but a headache. Yesterday I would have written the same thing. We only have one Vista machine here, a Dell Vostro 200 I bought with Vista simply to see how well it works. I bought the machine with 512 MB, more memory than we have in any of our other machines, but it worked like a dog. The machine was so bad that no one would use it. After thinking about it a little while, I decided that there was an excellent chance the machine was merely memory limited, so I ordered a 1GB memory module from Dell. It arrived yesterday and I installed it this morning. All of a sudden, things that either didn't work before or worked very poorly simply sail along at good speed now. The little Vista machine may now be our best PC (and we have a lot of Macs, Windows 98x's, Me's and XP's as well). Dell recommends that you put 2GB in your PC when running Vista. I no longer think that they're merely trying to sell you additional memory. My machine now has 1.5GB in it, and I'm really quite pleased with it after a day's worth of use. I too would now recommend 2GB of memory, especially given how little it costs nowadays. Wirt Atmar
