Windows on Dell, Windows on iMac

ID:45576
 
Jul 20 2008, 11:32 am
Keywords: computers, games
A little over a year ago I spent around $4k for a very snazzy maxed-out quad-core machine to run Vista so I could get the absolute best out of the latest games with a machine that would be relevant for years to come. Yes, this qualifies as probably the biggest software-choice mistake of my life. Little did I know that Vista would be the "release that time forgot"!

I've had a year of games that won't run on Vista due to various incompatibilities, and probably only one game, BioShock, where I allegedly got to see anything of DirectX 10, though I couldn't tell you what part of it you couldn't see on XP.

Just recently I bought a 24" iMac (because, you know, I need a machine where I can actually get things done, where I have Unix at my fingertips, and where the UI doesn't make my eyes bleed). I decided to devote some disk space to XP through Bootcamp, which allows you to run Windows natively on an Intel Mac. The result? I can play Windows games again -- yay!

So now I have a snazzy machine running Vista and a snazzy machine running XP, and you can guess what my desk typically looks like:



Yup, the $4k Vista machine spends much of its time on a panic blue screen, while XP on the iMac hums along just fine.

Honestly from my past experience I thought "Windows always crashes" was an out -of-date myth, but just yesterday I must have restarted the Vista machine half a dozen times after it panicked, something that has never occurred on the iMac, for either XP or the Mac OS. Spybot can't find anything, and the memory tests out fine. Who knows.

Anyway, I gotta go play some more Overlord on my iMac!
Jul 20 2008, 11:35 am
Fib Gibbley would cream over your keyboard (maybe a little less because it's a dell).
Jul 20 2008, 11:36 am
Nice mousepad!
Jul 20 2008, 11:39 am
Whats with the bunny and dinosaur?
Jul 20 2008, 11:41 am
Jul 20 2008, 11:54 am
SuperAntx wrote:
This stole the spotlight.

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/9765/padva2.png

Indeed... where can I get one?
Jul 20 2008, 11:55 am
Jul 20 2008, 11:56 am
Crashed wrote:
http://www.cafepress.com/byond.3387442

Nice, I'll have to invest in one this week now. >.<

*Edit*
and a few shirts...
Jul 20 2008, 1:37 pm
I'm running an Intel Macbook as well, with a bootcamp XP partition. I was running primarily XP for awhile, but I'm currently getting the BSOD whenever I try and boot to windows. So I'm using my 30gig OSX partition instead of my 80gig Windows partition.

Damnit.
Jul 20 2008, 1:54 pm
This is what i did, only the partition process went alittle wrong and i have about 20gig on my windows and 130gig on my mac side, =/ so now i have to redo it...
Jul 20 2008, 2:50 pm
Feel free to send me your old systems, like the old days =P. And I totally still have that mousepad you sent me. I'm assuming you bought it around the same time you bought yours.
Jul 20 2008, 3:30 pm
I can honestly I've never really had a problem with Windows*1 (in terms of stability. With everything else, of course, plenty of problems). My machine pretty much never crashes, reboots or BSODs unexpectantly*2- and I've done obscene, god awful things to it including massive rebuilds, partitioning, moving about of very sensitive system files to different drives and decidedly dodgy masking tape-grade repair jobs to keep it all together.

I also know people who have had massive, horrible problems on computers much, much simpler with a much less traumatic history, so I'm putting it down to sod's law and an incredibly lucky break on my side of things.

*1 XP that is. I would never touch Vista.

*2 though if I want to make it crash, that's pretty easy. :p
Jul 21 2008, 1:25 pm
I'm the same way as Elation. I ran Win98 (first edition!) up until 2004 where I was forced to upgrade to Windows XP in order to install newer software... and that was because the software merely checked the OS and reported invalid if it was pre-XP; I doubt it was actually incompatible with Win98. In my history of computer use, I've almost never run into crashes. The crashes I did encounter, it usually amounted to some program wildly exceeding its authority in msconfig's startup profile.

I think the big problem is the fact that many people leave their computers running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Aside from the fact that this is incredibly wasteful of electricity and of ventilation/air conditioning (modern computers run pretty hot), Windows is seemingly designed for the layman who turns on his computer only when he needs to get something done: it isn't designed for long-term stability. I'm sure Microsoft wants it to be stable in the long term, but it just didn't turn out that way.

That said, I can run my computer for several days straight with no apparent problems. I don't remember the last time I had a BSOD. That said, I turn off my computer nightly unless I need to be courteous by seeding a file I downloaded via BitTorrent.
Jul 21 2008, 1:40 pm
I turn mine off when not in use, so that's not the answer for me...
Jul 21 2008, 5:11 pm
Yeah, I've always been pretty shocked to hear some people leave their PCs going 24/7.

I can understand if it's a server of some kind but other than that, how bad is a minute long (if that) boot-up wait?


I dunno if you're taking suggestions or anything Deadron, but you might want to try checking out your drivers. See if there's updated versions for your graphics card/sound card, etc.
Jul 21 2008, 8:25 pm
I don't really run my system 24/7, but I usually leave it up for a few days at a time. Recently it's been really damned hot here so it's getting a lot more time off than normal.
Jul 24 2008, 12:44 pm
I love that mousemat!
Jul 27 2008, 2:16 pm
My family's computer randomly crashed once. The whole C drive was wiped, too (either that, or we lost everything we added to it. I'm not sure). I never had any problems with my laptop, which runs vista, though.