Looking for my 1st Mac

[Justin]

I was looking last night and it appeared you could download Outlook Express for nothing. I've been playing with other software, Thunderbird is good but I seem to have problems setting accounts up in there. I've been testing Postbox this last few days, very simple software...very..but seems to work ok. OE takes some beating though.

[JSR]

http://www.webmasterworld.com/microsoft ... 231524.htm

There are still massive amounts of people out there using XP, so many that Microsoft extended the support for it for an extra 5 years.

The reason this happened was because of netbooks. Four years ago (just as XP's support was about to end), Asus developed the netbook market which took off wildly. At first netbooks came with Linux, but Microsoft saw that they were losing out. Vista was too bloated and too much of a resource-hog to make it practical for netbooks. All Microsoft had was XP. So they quickly extended the support for XP and allowed netbook manufacturers to put it on netbooks on the cheap - this pretty much killed off the "Linux" variant of netbooks.

Microsoft did say that Windows 7 would counter the bloated nature of Vista and would make it more netbook-friendly. Then other manufacturers jumped on the netbook bandwagon, flooding the market with inferior models to increase their profit margins (making them bigger and replacing the SSDs with HDDs). The larger capacity hard drives on these models allowed Windows 7 to stay as bloated as it is, and it ended up not being so netbook-friendly after all.

Today there are no "real" netbooks anymore (by that I mean 9" models using SSDs), so the whole thing's been consigned to a footnote in the past, but that's the reason XP support was given a new lease of life.

[mgibbs]

I think extension of XP support is more to do with the fact that huge numbers of businesses were put off by Vista so remained with XP.

We've done that here. Trialled Vista and decided that its hardware requirement would mean replacing around 300 pcs so we didn't bother.

Windows 7 is much more like XP in its hardware requirement so we started a gradual rollout of 7 at the end of last year. So far its been a success with only 2 programs unable to run under 7. One is written in-house so will be re-written and the other was a very old CAD frontend system and we were wanting to migrate away from it anyway.

Mark

[djhutton]

Tried the free download of outlook express but it doesn't work with 7 or vista which is a shame - hence the search for a legit copy of outlook.

DJ

[ptholt]

Did you ever try the Hackintosh route Justin?

I have worked in IT for over 20 years, from pre windows green screen things, to a pc on every desk (and i have to laugh when everyone talks about virtualisation and cloud services, its just like we used to use 15 years ago lol).

I have about 12 machines around the house in various guises -
2 x linux based media players streaming from a NAS
2 x macs (one imac for the wife, a dual quad core Intel mac pro for me)
3 x win 7 desktops for the kids (a little easier for there school stuff, till they go to uni which is more mac aware or so im told)
2 x win 7 laptops when out and about (would like a macbook pro, but see below)
1 x macbook air (so deliciously light and small had to get one)
1 x win 7 netbook (kids ultra portable)
1 x win 7 dell xps that acts as a gateway to my plotter and printer as they are usb only and in a different part of the house (and it was cheaper than a third apple mac just to sit there).

So im fairly confident in my IT abilities, 3-4 years ago i bought the wife her first imac, one of the white ones, i paid about £500 for a year old one from a client of mine that was struggling to get on with it.

We ran this till 18 months ago, and when we came to sell it, it fetched £475 on ebay..... which meant the purchase of her new silver one was pretty well subsidised, this is not something that generally happens with pcs in my experience, they normally in my house get stripped, useful aprts kept for spares and the rest goes to the tip..

returning from a three holiday approx 18 months ago i was at the time running a fairly high spec pc, q9550 cpu, 8gb ram, 1gb video etc on windows 7.
On getting back into the office my wife and i turned our machines on and both were up and running fairly quickly, however my wife was reading through her emails, yet my machine appeared to only want to do what it wanted, it wanted to update win7, update the anti virus, update windows defender, run a scan, update my other anti - spyware program, update this, that and the bleeding other all whilst steadfastly refusing to do anything else.

Somewhat frustrated watching my wife merrily click through her emails whilst all this was going on, and her steadfast refusal to leave mac land once she had entered i took the plunge and bought the mac pro.

It has on the most part been something of a revelation that i wished i had done years ago, it felt a little empowering in that i no longer felt like the tail was wagging the dog.
Granted the initial purchase price was high, however its a seriously chunky piece of kit (so at least feels like it warrants it, though a large part of the cost is the badge), but other things like adding memory, extra hard drives take 10 seconds and dont require fingers 12 cms long and .5 wide due to being surrounded in spaghetti.

Accessories via ebay are surprisingly cheap (i just bought an extra 8gb of ram (on top of the 22gb its currently running) purely because a store was selling some kingston ram brand new and sealed on ebay for £50, sounds cheap to me!

Don't flame me to much, i still run windows machines, i actually really like windows 7 and it has blurred the lines between windows and mac os. But would i go back to microsoft for my own personal machine in the near future? No chance, but i do pander to ms in that i run Parrallels software that allows me to open windows file formats at the touch of a button by having a windows 7 session running (in parrallel - get it?) with my mac os.

[Justin]

Not done much more really. I have a PC built up to Hackintosh specs but the kids are using it at the moment My PC appears very stable since I stopped allowing automatic updates.

I've toyed with the idea of getting a mac, I think I'd go the iMac route but have to find the money for the software as well. I've started playing with Linux installs again and have currently settled with Linux Mint which seems OK.

[ptholt]

i'm running ubuntu on two media players around the house with xbmc running on top, they dont need massive spec, massive ram, they just work well and fast with very little fuss and drama

[smitch6]

i'd love a macbook air or pro, i have a normal white macbook at present and love it but it does struggle occasionly when running dreamweaver, photoshop and tons of websites open rofl

[JSR]

i'm running ubuntu on two media players around the house with xbmc running on top, they dont need massive spec, massive ram, they just work well and fast with very little fuss and drama

Do you know any brand of Linux that'll run on really old-spec machine? I have an ancient laptop here which I think is a P120, 16MB RAM, 1GB HDD, no CD, no USB, no floppy drive, 800x600 screen. I managed to shoe-horn Windows 98 on it some time back, but I'd prefer something that could be secured against current threats.

[ptholt]

there are a couple of variants that spring to mind, but there are a couple of linux live cd where you can test different variants, the problem you do have is getting it on something with no usb or optical drives.
I would suggest copying it onto the hd and running it from there if possible