From my expereince, windows XP is more stable as I have yet to expereince a crash, as compared to 10.2. But its not a good benchmark as the hardware running the 2 operating systems are different.
But OS X definately offers a much better computing expereince. Though windows do offer a much better gaming expereince....
I haven't crashed in OS X except once for a hardware problem. I've only crashed once with XP too in about the two weeks I've had it. I think the days of who crashes more are beginning to end.
I've actually had Jaguar encounter quite a few kernel panics in my time. I'd say at least ten since I installed it last August. Which isn't bad. But OS X has other really strange things, like entire applications inexplicably freezing for a half-minute at a time, and some really annoying OpenGL freezes which, since, there is no way to step out of a full-screen game, might as well be kernel panics. And don't even get me started on the Finder.
Anyone still carping about XP's stability (kernel/program/framework integration notwithstanding) hasn't used the OS for any reasonable period of time. It's about as far ahead in that area as OS X is in interface usability and graphics prowess.
neither one *crashes* per se at this stage of the game.
i've found that on windows machines i tend to run into more just plain old weird problems that aren't fixable, not w/o a reformat and reinstall.
with OSX, the only problems i've had have happened with 10.2.4. if i'd been thinking i would have actually tried waiting a day or two before running the update, but X has made me over confident.
I have not tried XP yet at work. I hope they do soon, because I am fed up with all the crashes in WindowsME or whatever it is they have got installed on my machine.
OS X and Windows XP I've found to be similar in stability - however, when apps crash in Windows XP, they crash HARD. Most of the time, I have to wait a minute or two before Windows can end the task. I don't know why that's the case, but somehow that's just what happens. So I prefer OS X in that regard.
I have been around windows all my life untill recently when I switched over to my new ibook. I currently have a dell desktop, laptop and and older HP pavilion. Each year the Windows seems to get better and better. I have had little trouble with XP really crashing on my smartsteep laptop. Its happened a few times but nothing was too badly ruined. My dell desktop (now going on its tird year) was running on win98 until about a month ago when i upgraded it to XP home. Upgrading for me on this one was a huge mistake. There is many compatibility problems as far as drivers for graphics cards and external optical drives. My mom uses this worn down desktop and "crashes" just about every other day. As far as my ibook it hasn't crashed at all just a few friendly opperator errors. Both operating systems seem pretty stable, just be careful upon upgrading.
In general, Windows XP has been vastly more stable for me than Mac OS X.
In the 3-4 months my family has owned a 1GHz TiBook, it's crashed at least 10 times (my account's caches seemed to be screwed up causing a kernel lockup every other lockout [now fixed], it's relatively unstable when inserting and removing PCMCIA CompactFlash cards, and it has recently been panicking on my wife when accessing Windows' SMB drives).
My home-build PC running Windows XP Pro hasn't crashed on me, ever, in the 6 months or so that I've been running it.
My Gateway laptop (also running XP Pro) used to crash on my during 3D games, but that was due to their crappy GeForce2 Go drivers. Since modifying the standard nVidia drivers and getting them to install, I've had zero crashes on that system either.
That said, I won't be buying another Microsoft OS (the company's licensing practices, notably tying the OS forever to my hardware with no option for transfer to another system, have turned me off). The interface and usage of OS X are much more to my liking.
In my experience, windows machines don't really have too many hard crashes, just app crashes, and things often just get foobar-ed (repainting problems, etc), requiring a restart. In general, I restart my mac less than I restart windows XP, and I'm on my mac much more often.
On the other hand, Windows takes a lot less time to restart. Maybe 30 seconds, as opposed to about two minutes on my iBook. First, it takes 15 seconds just to shut down, then another 15-30 on the gray Apple logo, and then another 20 or so to get to where I can actually use the computer. I very rarely shut down or restart my iBook, but when I do it's quite slow.
While not crashes, my iMac 800 logs me out a lot in 10.2. And by "a lot" I mean several times a day. I've had my new Athlon 2600+ PC for almost 2 months now and it has crashed once.
I think the stability has gone up substantially in Windows since 2000 came out. Of course, just when I was gonna say that, my coworkers' XP box crashed while he was trying to browse the network. It has this annoying bug where it kicks him off the network, then we he tries to browse to a server, it tries to search for that server name online using MSN search (god knows why)? and then promptly crashes IE.
The system itself isn't too bad. I used to do a lot of tech support for my mom when she had Win98, but I bought her Windows 2000 Professional (and a good firewall) and it seems to work a lot better.
The 'classic' Mac OS was pretty unstable if you tried to run a bunch of apps at once. But...you could always tell which application was causing the problems. Same with extensions. On Windows it often seems to have problems out of the blue, and tracing the source of the problem is usually more difficult.
I've been running Mac OS X since 10.0, and the only crashes I've had were from Mac OS X not liking my Initio SCSI card (caused kernel panic, fixed now) and the dreaded 'network hanging bug'.
My roommate's XP has crashed 5-10 times, mine hasn't since Jag. Before it was just Carrasho Server's fault. And XP still includes that cool painting program where when it crashes and you drag the window, it "ghosts", it creates shadows of itself everyhwere. Very nice feature to make you happy even when your XP crashes.
I've noticed OS X is pretty much rock solid, but if you do an upgrade things can go haywire. Someone mentioned 10 kernel panics and that's probably not indicative of the OS so much as a bad install (which is somewhat indicative of the OS.)
Comments
but before that, 95/98 are simply terrible, but I have no idea how it compares with classic Mac OSes
But OS X definately offers a much better computing expereince. Though windows do offer a much better gaming expereince....
Anyone still carping about XP's stability (kernel/program/framework integration notwithstanding) hasn't used the OS for any reasonable period of time. It's about as far ahead in that area as OS X is in interface usability and graphics prowess.
i've found that on windows machines i tend to run into more just plain old weird problems that aren't fixable, not w/o a reformat and reinstall.
with OSX, the only problems i've had have happened with 10.2.4. if i'd been thinking i would have actually tried waiting a day or two before running the update, but X has made me over confident.
Viva OSX on my home machine!
OS X
windows XP
mac OS 9
windows 98 and mac OS 8,6
-MGG
In the 3-4 months my family has owned a 1GHz TiBook, it's crashed at least 10 times (my account's caches seemed to be screwed up causing a kernel lockup every other lockout [now fixed], it's relatively unstable when inserting and removing PCMCIA CompactFlash cards, and it has recently been panicking on my wife when accessing Windows' SMB drives).
My home-build PC running Windows XP Pro hasn't crashed on me, ever, in the 6 months or so that I've been running it.
My Gateway laptop (also running XP Pro) used to crash on my during 3D games, but that was due to their crappy GeForce2 Go drivers. Since modifying the standard nVidia drivers and getting them to install, I've had zero crashes on that system either.
That said, I won't be buying another Microsoft OS (the company's licensing practices, notably tying the OS forever to my hardware with no option for transfer to another system, have turned me off). The interface and usage of OS X are much more to my liking.
John
The system itself isn't too bad. I used to do a lot of tech support for my mom when she had Win98, but I bought her Windows 2000 Professional (and a good firewall) and it seems to work a lot better.
The 'classic' Mac OS was pretty unstable if you tried to run a bunch of apps at once. But...you could always tell which application was causing the problems. Same with extensions. On Windows it often seems to have problems out of the blue, and tracing the source of the problem is usually more difficult.
I've been running Mac OS X since 10.0, and the only crashes I've had were from Mac OS X not liking my Initio SCSI card (caused kernel panic, fixed now) and the dreaded 'network hanging bug'.