Mac Vs Windows

[a warp]

I have a now ancient Mac pro (early 200 which has a radeon 4780 card with 512mb video ram. I use it all the time for photography and use aperture and cs4 with no problems what so ever.

Colour management is built into the OSX and works very well.

I would not buy RAM from apple. I usually go to offtek.co.uk or crucial.com for memory. You upgrade it very easily yourself.

[boristhemoggy]

All this has helped me make my decision and I appreciate your advice.
I am going to buy one, but apparently a new model is due out in June, so I am waiting for that release to either buy a new one, or pick up the existing model at a better price.
Thanks again for the comments.

[E]

I've added ram to my iMac myself, just snap it in and go...piece of cake, easy as pie.

[Sportymonk]

Originally Posted by boristhemoggy

I've been looking today at the Imac 21.5 inch and am sorely tempted from my 18.4 inch Windows 7 laptop.
The only one sticky point for me, is that the Imac only had 512 mb of video RAM on a Radeon card, whilst my laptop has 1 gig, and can 'borrow' another gig off the system RAM.

The Imac is £999, which is a lot of money if it's not going to run Lightroom, Elements and Pshop CS 5.
I would welcome comments form people who've used this model of Imac and Windows too and can compare the two please.

Don't worry, I got a 27" iMac last year and it runs Photoshop 6 Beta, Lightroom 2, Open Office etc all at the same time without a flaw. I did upgrade the ram from 4 to 12 GB by adding two sticks of 4GB in the two empty slots. The iMac has four slots and the factory 4GB fills the first two. Some may say the ram has to be matched but not so. I bought my Ram at Crucial as it has a great reputation.

[xpclassified]

Forget the Mac!
Windows FTW!

[pszilard]

Originally Posted by meinster

Boris..
...I have found, is that in the windows environment, the programs tend to be a bit of resource hogs.. even before running any program, I already use 4 gigs of my ram. ...

Windows 7 and Vista will show high ram usage, because it attempts to use as much as possible for caching/buffering. Doesn't mean that it actually is USING 4GB just that it will make use of it!

I have both an Apple Macbook Pro 13" with i7 cpu and 8GB ram and a Windows 7 PC with 12GB triple channel ram and 3TB disks. I have connected both to a 27" Dell monitor and find no problems running Lightroom 4 on either machine.

Only time that I was noticing performance differences was rendering video.

I find that the Mac requires much less effort to keep it in good shape. Just run software updates regularly and DO install an Antivirus. Do NOT believe that it is not required! IT IS, Sophos has a free one, or buy Kaspersky or Intego, and also get a large USB drive and turn on TimeMachine for the world's simplest backup. It's good too!

[Eric Nepean]

I have a 2010 iMac with 2.66GHz I5, 12GB RAM and a Radeon 4850 video card. Without the extra 8GB of RAM, I think this is bout the same processing power as the iMac you are now contemplating. It ran Photoshop CS3,4,5 just fine as it came from Apple, but I noticed a performance improvement when I added the 8GB of RAM. (I used Kingston RAM -about half the price of Apple RAM)

There is by the way technical difference between the way Mac OSX and Windows treat memory, even though they run on the same hardware platform. As a consequence of this, RAM over 4GB provides a greater potential advantage to OSX than to Windows

WIndows and OSX are most often run in 32bit mode. The largest amount of memory that can be directly addressed by 32 bits is 4GB. The intel processor used in the HW which is used to run both operating systems has a mechanism called PAE that allows more than 4GB to be addressed by a program or application running in 32 bit mode.

OSX has for quite some time enabled PAE, so OSX applications can reserve and use amounts of RAM bigger than 4GB.

However many versions of windows do not support PAE, and it seems that most versions of Windows still have a 4 GB limit on physical memory. Even after a Windows program gets 4GB of RAM it has to reserve over 1GB of that memory for the operating system to use.

Physical Address Extension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Physical Address Extension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Physical Address Extension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So at the end of the day an OSX system will make more use of a large >>4GB amount of RAM than a a Windows system, and that may also be why some computer stores more used to dealing with Windows than Mac don't recommend more than 4GB.

On my iMac, described above, after installing the additional 8GB of RAM to make 12GB all told, I performed a load test to see how much I could run at once. I was able to run and and have several documents open in each of Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Aperture, IPhoto, IMovie, iTunes, Mail, Calendar, Address Book, Photoshop CS5, and at the same time run VMware with an an instance of Windows XP. At this point there was 11.2 GB of RAM allocated, the screen was obscured by numerous windows, and the machine was running somewhat slower, particularly when switching between programs, but nothing crashed and nothing hung.

Hope that helps.

[pszilard]

Eric's description is very good. I would just like to add to it a little, in that 64bit operating systems, such as Windows XP 64bit, or Windows 7 64bit, or Apple's OSX Lion are all 64bit and therefore can access over 4GB of ram. If your application is also 64 bit, such as current Lightroom or Photoshop, then that application alone, can potentially use over 4GB of ram. If the app was only 32bit, but the OS was 64bit, then the app could operate in it's own space of up to 4GB.

If that much physical ram was not available then the system use "swap" or "page" files, to pretend that it has more memory than it has in reality.

Bottom line: if you are happy to change yourself, and your programs to a Mac, then just do it. If you can, then add RAM to the Mac up to 8GB. And enjoy

[Carusoswi]

I agree. It sounds like you are curious about the iMac, so, I say, go ahead and get one and enjoy.

I started with Apple when most computers could do very little beyond word processing, spreadsheets, and simple games. I switched to PC because, at the time, much more software was available on the PC side.

Since then, both platforms have blossomed beyond my wildest dreams.

I now run a new Windows7 (I finally dragged myself beyond XP) iCore7 quad core laptop with 16gb RAM and a 21.3" screen. I have it set up as a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux as the second OS.

This laptop is extremely powerful, very fast. Photoshop was slow to load on my 2004 era single core PC, and Sony's Vegas Pro that I use to edit video took so long that you could brew a cup of coffee while it loaded.

Both load in an instant on my new machine.

I've never been very conversant with computer architecture, because I never really took an interest in it. I cannot tell you how an ICore7 works, or how the innards of a new Apple works.

But, like most of us, I spend a lot of time, both professionally and leisurely, on the computer.

My impression of Apple, admittedly formed a long time ago, is that their products are reliable, but expensive when compared to Windows. With Windows, we were free to experiment, tinker, and prone to viruses.

Today, with Windows, at least, we are a little less free to tinker, and a lot less likely to contract viruses.

Taking a page from Linux, one now has to give Windows7 permission before any executable is allowed to make changes to your computer, so, while not fool-proof, the threat of virus infection, IMHO, has been greatly reduced on the Windows side.

As for Linux, there does not even exist, to my knowledge, an anti-virus program designed to protect the Linux system from infection. There are anti-virus applications designed to run on Linux, but their purpose is to disinfect downloaded or emailed files so that you do not inadvertently pass an infected file on to the Windows or Mac community.

I've played some with Macs owned by my sister and some of my friends, so I understand that they can also run the Windows OS as well as the MAC OS (which is based upon a Unix kernel).

. . . and, of course, you can run many Windows programs in Linux (even older versions of Photoshop), and you can also dual boot Linux on a MAC.

All this convergence is good news to those of us who consume computer utility, and that is why I encourage you to indulge that "tickle in your fancy" to try a MAC. Go for it, enjoy it, and let us know, once you have put on some mileage, how you are getting on.

Caruso

Originally Posted by pszilard

Eric's description is very good. I would just like to add to it a little, in that 64bit operating systems, such as Windows XP 64bit, or Windows 7 64bit, or Apple's OSX Lion are all 64bit and therefore can access over 4GB of ram. If your application is also 64 bit, such as current Lightroom or Photoshop, then that application alone, can potentially use over 4GB of ram. If the app was only 32bit, but the OS was 64bit, then the app could operate in it's own space of up to 4GB.

If that much physical ram was not available then the system use "swap" or "page" files, to pretend that it has more memory than it has in reality.

Bottom line: if you are happy to change yourself, and your programs to a Mac, then just do it. If you can, then add RAM to the Mac up to 8GB. And enjoy

[Carusoswi]

. . . and, as an aside, I was visiting with my son/daughter-in-law over the Easter weekend in Miami, FL. He has an old Apple iPod that he wanted to have reformatted (he didn't know how to do it), so we stopped at one of those Apple stores (whatever they are called). This was on a Saturday afternoon. The place was mobbed . . . people queued three and four deep waiting to speak with a sales associate.

There was a young lady "directing traffic" and I asked her if there was some special sale that day, or if the store was always that busy. She replied that traffic was actually on the light side that day, and that the store was usually even busier, and that I would generally find that sort of frenzy at most Apple stores across the country.

I give Apple a lot of credit for executing the sort of marketing plan that creates that sort of buying frenzy, and I remember when many computer stores were abuzz with similar traffic.

My days of being a frenzied consumer are long past, however. I doubt any product is really that good.

Caruso