I own both Mac's and PC's and I've had to use both for work and home use so I'm going to suggest going Mac to you specifically because you've emphasized "newbie" and ADD.

If you have a technological interest, like to "tinker" with hardware and actually enjoy poking around the net for hours trying to get 3rd party hardware drivers and in general, spending significant amounts of time and energy constantly updating software...go PC.

That being said. If you were to learn computers from scratch on a PC you would, out of shear necessity, possibly become proficient at the Windows operating system. Then again, you may just become so frustrated that you start to questioning how much quality really costs. By that I mean, do you want to save money by getting a cheap PC with a questionably stable OS, or would you rather pay more upfront and get a more user friendly OS?

As far as reliability is concerned, my first iMac was a G3 with 512m ram and a 6 gig hard drive. No problems until last year when the power supply went bad. We're talking about almost 9 years of continuous use. PC's? I lost count of the power supplies, bad motherboards, inexplicable crashes leading to lengthy system reinstalls...and that's just on my own PC's, not the ones at work.

Go Mac. You'll only cry once.

This is working a a reseller for years. Schools will but HP, compaq, IBM, Dell dekstops (business models, not the presarios and such you see in retail stores, look at vercra, deskpro, evo, etc as there is a big difference) by the hundreds and we would get the occasional failure. Then they buy a dozen Apples and complain that they got two DOA's and three more fail in the first month then kept asking us to get apple certified which apple had a big catch 22 preventing that from happening so I kept sending referral after referral to other places for repairs.

Then there was the one guy at the state agency who every time I was there kept telling me how much better has mac was than by 5 year old compaq Armada I carried with me every day and was my home and work main system and was run 24x7 all that time. He could never show me his apple because it was in for repair every time yet he still bragged about how much better it was than a pc. Apple users seem to forget about all the overheating problems and happily buy expensive cooling pads and have to chain theris to a desk, or the power supply fire issues, or the ffact that you can't swap the drive without vioding the warranty so they have a half dozen externals hanging off of them (might as well buy a desktop then).

I have a newer laptop now a 6 year old dell latitude c400. It has dents and cracks in the case from me banging it or dropping it and the backlight started getting dim so I had to order a $10 replacement. I keep thinking abot buying a newer laptop but this one just keep working so well and I can't find anything I really like.

Oh well - that just goes to show that statistics and individual experience don't often match well.

Apple does have pretty bad anecdotal track record for 1st of kind (or rev 0) versions of computers. The usual comment is if apple is introducing something new wait 6 months and get the B model. Not as true as it used to be but apparently one of the hazards of buying bleeding edge tools/toys from a computer company that wants to "think different".

What ever gets the job done for you is the tool you should use.

Of course sometimes Karma (or the Force) is just against you and you should pack it in and try something else.

- Eric

Thats because the statistics are all from user surveys. no matter how bad the service apple users will report it perfect to places like consumer reports.

So you recommend a $400 box running VISTA?


------

Internal Microsoft emails were released in a class action suit against Microsoft over Vista's failure to deliver.

Translation: We screwed up Vista beyond any hope of fixing it, so we have to do Windows 7 right.

quote:
From: Jon Shirley
To: Steve Balmer
Subject: Vista

I upgraded one of the two machines I use a lot to Vista. The most persistent and so far hardest to fix issues are both with MSN products, Portfolio in MSN Money and Music (downloads that I had bought in the past).

The other machine I will not upgrade as there are no drivers yet for my Epson printer (top of the line and in production today but no driver yet), Epson scanner (older but also top of the line they say they will not do a driver for) and a Nikon film scanner that will get a driver one day but no date is set yet. If I had purchased a new machine I would be in the same situation since the Nikon driver is used by current as is the Epson printer. I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is such a shortage of drivers. I suppose the vendors did not trust us to us enough to use the beta for driver testing?

Most of the software I use is OK or available for Vista except for spyware and some obscure utilities.

Jon

From: Steve Balmer
To: Jon Shirley
Subject: RE:Vista

You are right that people did not trust us have you checked windows update I assume you found no drivers there either?? Thanks

From: Steven Sinofsky
To: Steve Ballmer
CC: Bill Veghte
Subject: RE: Vista

This is the same across the whole ecosystem.

From: Steve Ballmer
To: Steven Sinofsky
CC: Bill Veghte
Subject: RE:Vista

Should we do something different do you agree scanners are particularly bad thanks

From: Steven Sinofsky
To:Steve Ballmer
CC:Bill Vehgte, Jon Devaan
Subject: RE:Vista

I think folks are working on this now and we just need time.

Basically I think three things worked against us:
- No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006. This led to the lack of availability. For example my home multi-function printer did not have drivers until 2/2 and even pulled their 1/30 drivers and re-released them (Brother).
- Massive change in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM, especially with respect to Windows Media Center. This led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.
- A lot of change led to many Windows XP drivers not really working at all - this is across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories (fingerprint readers, smartcards, tv tuners), and so on. This category is due to the fact that many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models. For example, OrlandoA is not on Vista because there are no drivers for his Verizon card yet. Microsoft's own hardware was missing a lot of support (fingerprint reader, MCE extender, etc.)

People who rely on using all the features of their hardware {like Jon's Nikon scanner) will not see availability for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with by Brother printer and use it as a stand-along fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother.

The Vista Ready logo program required drivers available on 1/30. I think we had a reasonable coverage, but quality was uneven as I experienced.

Intel has the biggest challenge. Their "945" chipset which is the baseline Vista set "barely" works right now, and is very broadly used. The "915" chipset which is not Aero capable is in a huge number of laptops and was tagged "Vista Capable" but not Vista Premium. I don't know if this was a good call. But these function but will never be great. Even the 945 set has new builds of drivers coming out constantly but hopes are on the next chipset rather than on this one.

The point Jim had of declaring a Release Candidate was because he sensed people were not really working under a deadline in the ecosystem. This helped even though we knew we had more work to do on our side.

So far I am surprised at the low call volume in PSS. I think we have a lot of new PCs which helps and the hobbyist people who bought FPP/UPG just know what to do and aren't calling, but I know they are struggling.

All of this is why we need much more clarity and focus at events like WinHEC. We need to be clearer with industry and we need to decide what we will do and do that well and 100% amd not just do a little of everything which leaves the IHV in a confused state.

From:Bill Veghte
To:Mike Slevert, Mike Nash, Brad Brooks, Scott Di Valerio, Jawas Khaki

Fyi... I think Steven's mail is spot on and highlights how much we need to keep pushing super, super hard if we are going to accelerate our deployments and quality of customer experience.

From: Mike Nash (Microsoft vice president)
To: Bill Veghte, Mike Slevert, Brad Brooks, Scot Di Valerio, Jawad Khaki
Subject: RE:Vista

Agreed.

I personally got burned by the Intel 915 chipset issue on a laptop that I PERSONALLY (eg with my own $$$). Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run Glass, but more importantly wouldn't run Movie Maker (I guess that is being addressed). I now have a $2100 email machine.

Is there a spreadsheet that shows feedback on h/w compat issues by IHV and OEM based on customer call etc?

Thanks,

Mike

From: Scott Di Valerio
To: Jim Totton, John Kalkman
Subject: FW:Vista

Do you guys want to craft a response?

From: John Kalkman
To: Scott Di Valerio, Jim Totton
Subject: RE:Vista

Not sure what we would accomplish. We told Poole what would happen if he changed our position on 915, and we did. Best thing to do is continue helping IHV and ISV's to make solid drivers and apps. That work is happening, as Steven notes below steadily. We have a ton more drivers available with Vista than we did for XP. Biggest thing I'm worried about is UAC (user access control.) It looks like more and more people are turning it off (based on advice from websites) for easier friction free use. This was the recent note you fwd'd that went to Steveb.

From: Scott Di Valerio
To: John Kalkman, Jim Totton
Subject: RE:Vista

I think we should jump in with a good response on what we had suggested and what we are seeing happening with the customers on the install etc. If we have suggestions for corrections to ease the customer pain going forward in the near term and long term. Expect this will get to KT soon so we want to have what we have done and what we plan to do (with the BG) to ease some pain.

From: John Kalkman
To: Scott Di Valerio
CC: Jim Totton
Subject: RE:Vista

Attached is the mail explaining the decision process and initial outcome with HP. In the end we lowered the requirements to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs panning and shipping higher end graphics for Vista ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHV's to readt great WHQL qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel's inability to ship a full featured 945 graphics driver for Windows Vista.

It's important that KT understand the decision process, and Jimali not necessarily being in agreement with decision. On what we are seeing happening with the customers on the install. This is harder to determine at the moment. Call volumes to CSS has been low, and graphics historically has been the largest call generator. 30% of crashes are continuing to be graphics related. Attached is the latest report on all IHV parts.

On suggestions for corrections to ease the customer pain going forward in the near term and long term. There is really nothing we can do in the short term. Express upgrade is almost over. In the long term we have worked had to establish and have committed an OEM Theme for Win7 planning. This was rejected for Vista. Having this theme puts accountability and early thinking on programs like Capable/Ready so that we make the right decisions early on.

Again to repeat the above more succinctly, it was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements. This created confusion in the industry on how important the aspect of visual computing would play as a feature set to new Windows Vista upgraders. We will take this learning into Win7 planning.

Let me know if you need more details or if missing something to front end a response to KT.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/MSFT.pdf

The class action suit: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/plaintiff_complaint.pdf

Does anyone know how many $2500+ Apple Mac Pros with 8 2.9 Ghz Cores and 8 Gbytes RAM and 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s of storage are out there with their owners sending and recieving the occassional email (if they can figure how to setup their accounts in Mac Mail) and browsing the internet on a 256kbit/sec 'Broadband' connection (if they can figure out how to setup their Ethernet ADSL router, let alone Wireless connection) there are?

Or do they just use their Apple Mac Pro as a handy handsome electrical panel heater sitting in the corner of the room?

Customer loyalty (however misguided in some cases) does say something about a company. Of course I'm not always sure exactly what it says

I wasn't thinking so much about the surveys by consumer reports and other consumer focused organizations- though those are probably pretty good. I was thinking about some of the more academic stuff that occasionally gets reported by those well know mac loving organizations like Wired and CNET (sorry for the excessive sarcasm - it has been a really uhmm odd day around here). Even if the fanboys are going to try to bend the results, professionally administered academic reviews have a lot of safeguards and usually produce representative results. On top of that I would expect groups like Wired and CNET to be pretty darned careful about publishing anything that sounded pro Apple, in my experience they tend to be a bit MS centric.

I think I'll bow out of this part of the discussion now since we know around here that the tool I love may not work for you and vice versa. Of course if I could just find an Apollo 3500 with the 40 MB hard drive and the 1 MB memory upgrade along with the token ring network card and grayscale monitor we could have fun discussing our favorite shell environments or how Domain rocked!! Now that was a computer!!

- Eric

I would hate to guess on the total but as a percentage I would say it about the same as the folks with the super duper high end Dell (or whatever) with lots of Cores and plenty of never to be used expansion slots etc., that use it to play solitaire or minesweeper. Sales dudes are great at up selling and an awful lot of people think that bigger numbers (whatever the sales droids are spouting this week) just have to be better than smaller numbers. It is never that simple with computers but very, very few people want to dig in enough to understand these complex marvels that most of us love and hate .


- Eric

Commodore 64 all the way!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

Nah... the TRS-80!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

Now that was a machine!