Behaviour of Apple/mac
As most of you guys, I am one of those people who had enough of microscumbag's tiranny.
I wanted to ask 2 questions before I get an Apple (though they probably won't change my opinion about getting an Apple).
If for example you have a second harddrive, or a third, build into your powermac, and for some reason you have to reinstall the operating system on your C-drive, does that leave your other physically segregated harddrives untouched? Reason for asking is that I just lost all my backups and photos on my E-drive because I had to reinstall winXP on my C-drive. Now WinXP no longer sees the, untouched, E-drive, which I used for my backups. Whenever I have a physically separate harddrive I expect that to be untouched and fully functional after a re-installation of an operating system, otherwise what use is a backup harddrive?
Second question, how stable is OS X compared to WinXP? On average, how often does the system need to be re-installed?
Third question: WinXP backs up everything everywhere, thereby not eating up all your space, but also, whenever a program has a conflict, and you need to uninstall it and reinstall it, WinXP just picks a backup from somewhere and dumps that into place, thereby giving back all the crap you tried to get rid of. Does Apple show a similar behaviour?
Related to this question is a useless function in XP. You can 'restore' to a certain date in time, undoing certain actions performed by the Operating System an dundoing installations. This never worked for me as normally if something goes wrong a lot of files get corrupted and therefore cannot be restored to their previous state. Again, does Apple also show such beahviour?
I just want to make sure that when I get an Apple, I don't keep the issues I try to run away from...
I wanted to ask 2 questions before I get an Apple (though they probably won't change my opinion about getting an Apple).
If for example you have a second harddrive, or a third, build into your powermac, and for some reason you have to reinstall the operating system on your C-drive, does that leave your other physically segregated harddrives untouched? Reason for asking is that I just lost all my backups and photos on my E-drive because I had to reinstall winXP on my C-drive. Now WinXP no longer sees the, untouched, E-drive, which I used for my backups. Whenever I have a physically separate harddrive I expect that to be untouched and fully functional after a re-installation of an operating system, otherwise what use is a backup harddrive?
Second question, how stable is OS X compared to WinXP? On average, how often does the system need to be re-installed?
Third question: WinXP backs up everything everywhere, thereby not eating up all your space, but also, whenever a program has a conflict, and you need to uninstall it and reinstall it, WinXP just picks a backup from somewhere and dumps that into place, thereby giving back all the crap you tried to get rid of. Does Apple show a similar behaviour?
Related to this question is a useless function in XP. You can 'restore' to a certain date in time, undoing certain actions performed by the Operating System an dundoing installations. This never worked for me as normally if something goes wrong a lot of files get corrupted and therefore cannot be restored to their previous state. Again, does Apple also show such beahviour?
I just want to make sure that when I get an Apple, I don't keep the issues I try to run away from...
Comments
Originally posted by ksporry
As most of you guys, I am one of those people who had enough of microscumbag's tiranny.
I wanted to ask 2 questions before I get an Apple (though they probably won't change my opinion about getting an Apple).
If for example you have a second harddrive, or a third, build into your powermac, and for some reason you have to reinstall the operating system on your C-drive, does that leave your other physically segregated harddrives untouched? Reason for asking is that I just lost all my backups and photos on my E-drive because I had to reinstall winXP on my C-drive. Now WinXP no longer sees the, untouched, E-drive, which I used for my backups. Whenever I have a physically separate harddrive I expect that to be untouched and fully functional after a re-installation of an operating system, otherwise what use is a backup harddrive?
Well, you'll never have to deal with any of that crap again.
Also, forget the entire 'C' drive, 'D' drive, insanity. Name them what ever you want. Boot from whichever one you want. Go nuts.
I have a server at home with two internal and two external drives. One internal has three partitions, for three different versions of MacOS. The other internal is the user directories drive. The two externals are backups. I can install a fresh OS on any of the three boot partitions, and it doesn't touch anything else. I can boot from any of the three partitions easily, and switch between them effortlessly.
Basically, you're going to have a lot of unlearning to do, just to purge the inane crap outta your head that Windows made you go through.
Second question, how stable is OS X compared to WinXP? On average, how often does the system need to be re-installed?
Six years, four machines, one re-install due to my own screw up. Most people never do it.
Third question: WinXP backs up everything everywhere, thereby not eating up all your space, but also, whenever a program has a conflict, and you need to uninstall it and reinstall it, WinXP just picks a backup from somewhere and dumps that into place, thereby giving back all the crap you tried to get rid of. Does Apple show a similar behaviour?
No. If you want to uninstall a program under MacOS X, most of the time you simply drag the application to the trash, and you're done. Really. I swear.
Related to this question is a useless function in XP. You can 'restore' to a certain date in time, undoing certain actions performed by the Operating System an dundoing installations. This never worked for me as normally if something goes wrong a lot of files get corrupted and therefore cannot be restored to their previous state. Again, does Apple also show such beahviour?
Apple doesn't have such a feature... to be honest, corruptions and conflicts are so rare that it isn't really needed. It just works.
I just want to make sure that when I get an Apple, I don't keep the issues I try to run away from...
Nope.
2) IMO OS X is extremely stable in comparison to Win XP. It really shouldn't ever have to be re-installed... can't think of when I had to do a reinstall on an OS X system.
3) Typical application installations will be a drag and drop process. Apps don't conflict with each other, and preferences for an app are typically kept in a file in a preferences folder. No registry over here
There's no built-in System Restore functionality in OS X.
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Edit: Kickaha, you suck.
As the people here have mentioned, there is really a lot to be 'unlearnt' when switching from Mac OS X. Much of the crap Windows has put us through is non existent in OS X. I don't own a Mac just yet, but from what I've heard OS X about as reliable as they come without using bare Unix.
Also, if you're having trouble with Windows not recognising files, you can use data recovery software and I almost guarantee you will retrieve all your information on a drive. Windows is poor in that reinstalling the operating system on a drive can potentially render other drives, or even partitions on that drive, completely useless. Sometimes this is a result of viruses (MSBlast) and spyware/malware (malicious variations completely taking over your computer and forcing XP into a corner while these unauthorised files do their work.) Then you have even standard reformatting/reinstalling of Windows not caused by anything in particular - even then Windows might show you these other drives but not let you access them beyond its 'D:' icon, which is a result of security permissions from your old installation of Windows impacting these drives, and the new Windows not being able to access them. You can get around this by using hashing techniques to crack the restriction algorithms your Windows security system has placed upon. (In other words it's impossible.)
But, as I said, recovery software gets around all this crap by letting you access it 100%. A program called Stellar Phoenix (NTFS/FAT) helped me recover "inaccessible" data as a result of an MSBlast variant, and also when I accidentally set both my drives as Master (Windows destroyed its ability to boot and showed only a black screen.) You will need to register (or otherwise
There's my two cents on the whole thing.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Have you *seen* my title?
Of course