Windows 7

[UhOhXplode]

I totally like my Windows 7 Ultimate. It's tons better than XP I get everything done way faster. I might try Windows 8 since I have a desktop and a tablet. They are both less than a year old so it should work on them. I hope.

[Manu]

Windows 8 probably wont' work on your Fire, but I'm sure someone in the enthusiast community will try. It should work on the desktop no worries.

[UhOhXplode]

If it won't work on my Fire then I will just keep using Windows 7. It works on both.

[Malcolm Wright]

Well - you get what you pay for.
Used windows, Apple, Amiga Atarii and linux on and off since the early 80's. Finally made the pretty permanent switch to Mac in 2006.

In the balance, I've found their price point to be perfectly positioned considering the benefits. And yes that is taking into account their faults.

M

[Archaix]

Apple laptops, from what I've seen, have about the same longevity as low-end PC laptops, although with a considerable advantage over most of them in terms of graphics cards and processors (I'm not an expert, but I shopped around recently for one). I don't think the software is as good though, and in the end I settled with an ASUS laptop for three reasons:

• They make parts for Apple and have a reputation for durability.
• Keyboard is great, with plenty of useful hotkeys. No preloaded crap on your system either (a la Dell), although Nuance Reader is to pdfs what Nickelback is to rock music.
• I'm helping to keep China out of Tiawan -and the Tiawanese name for ASUS is apparently 'Great Splendid Computer Corporation'.

[optimus]

I dunno, I've been a longtime PC laptop user and switched to a MacBook Pro and it is a damn awesome machine. Seems like it was built a thousand times better than any of my previous Dell laptops. I'll never go back to windows...I've seen the light.

[Malcolm Wright]

I dunno, I've been a longtime PC laptop user and switched to a MacBook Pro and it is a damn awesome machine. Seems like it was built a thousand times better than any of my previous Dell laptops. I'll never go back to windows...I've seen the light.

That was my experience too.
The Dells were good machines though and I actually had some very good experience with their customer support (they once same-day courriered a replacement internal DVD burner in Australia - my drive died and I had a replacement under warranty literally only hours later, delivered to my door).

The biggest factors in my choice were:

- OS: not having to deal with Windows in any of its forms has been a significant stress reduction. Its not good for your health to constantly be cursing the stupidity of designs you have to use on a daily basis. Mac OS isn't without its flaws but on the whole it is a very smooth experience. The laptop turning point came when I woke up one morning on a documentary shoot to find that the tape backup I had running during the night had been interrupted because Windows thought it had the right to force a restart of the machine because it had updates it wanted to install. Windows at the time was not stable enough to leave it running for several days without a restart anyway, so one has to wonder why the engineers thought it necessary to coerce people into restarting their machines for updates - it would happen soon enough anyway. Got a Macbook pro - problem solved. Not only does the OS not twist my arm in such ways, but I can run Mac OS for weeks without rebooting before things (usually Finder related) get a little buggy.

- Unix - I'm not sure why DOS was ever invented, let alone adopted. It is inferior to every flavor of Unix out there. Its syntax is less intuitive. When I realized Mac OS had a nix core, that became a huge factor. Again - stress reduction.

- A series of failures on my windows desktop machine drove me over the edge. The usb bus started failing intermittently. My editing software periodically needed to be reinstalled, and blue screened so often that I found myself losing work every day. Getting a Mac Pro was the best decision I could make - night and day... suddenly I was just able to get the job done without fighting the hardware and software.

- I was reassured to know I could run Windows on my Macs if the need arose. At first it did now and then. Now its been over a year since I booted into Windows.

M

[peters8]

Window 7 is good.... i like it. its fast

[House]

Vista was so bad, computer shops in my area sold "upgrades" to Windows XP before Windows 7 was released.

Anybody that thinks Windows 7 is bad... they're just plain doin' it wrong. Windows 7 is faster than XP (and uses less resources) if you have half a brain stem, and it's solid as a rock.

[Capricorn]

Using Windows 8 and Office 2013 Preview now.

[Capricorn]

Vista was so bad, computer shops in my area sold "upgrades" to Windows XP before Windows 7 was released.

Anybody that thinks Windows 7 is bad... they're just plain doin' it wrong. Windows 7 is faster than XP (and uses less resources) if you have half a brain stem, and it's solid as a rock.

I agree. I use both Windows 7 and Mac OSX, and now Windows 8 since October 2012, and both Windows OS are great and can be compared in stability and dependability to that of OSX (I know Mac users will not agree but I am talking from experience without bias). My not so secretive secret to a great Windows experience - in Win7 and 8, you can completely disable IE. Download Firefox and turn IE off (in turn Windows features on or off setting) and the crashes and freezes of Windows will be a thing of the past.