Hi All, P.Bull wrote:
Hi Muggers, More ammo in the PC versus Mac war. I have had Macs for about 20 years but have to slum it and use a PC a fair bit. I recently "uprgraded" to Windows XP Professional which looks quite nice and a bit Mac like. But in order to get the PC to use the external CD burner I had to install a new USB 2.0 card for $30. Then the modem couldn't get a dial tone and the tech told me that XP drivers were "terrible" so I had to install a new modem for $30. This was after wasting hours on both problems trying to make them work and finally admitting defeat and taking the PC box to the shop.
Although I agree with you as I am mostly a linux user I have to make two points here:
1) It sounds as if you are purchasing internal modems which are often "winmodems" meaning that the modem function is done in software rather than hardware. These are always bad news and you are always better off buying an external modem.
2) A lot of internal modem manufacturers include drivers which once installed will never allow your modem to work unless you format and reinstall the drivers (Netcomm were the worst offenders of this and they kept shipping the faulty drivers for about 3 years despite knowing that they didn't work).
So don't believe anyone who says XP is the greatest OS ever invented and Macs are too expensive or too hard to set up. My Mac just keeps on working.
So, again, although I agree with you, you can't blame these problems on Windows as they are partly to do with poor choices of hardware and the rest of the blam belongs to the modem manufacturers.
<SNIP> Adam.
