Posted on 02/12/2008 4:37:35 PM PST by Swordmaker
my son works at the Apple Store.
it is known as EASY PAY.
Having managed a network of Macs in a professional environment (newspaper, magazine publisher) circa 1995-2001, I can tell you that properly managed Macs of that vintage did not crash for just no reason.
The vast majority of crashes I had to fix were related to font issues: fonts from amateur fontographers, fonts with modified, mixed or borrowed metrics, fonts that had been built by someone who did not know what they were doing who left characters with unclosed paths or that would cause a divide by zero error when the font was reduced in size. Once I implemented a strict font policy, the crashes stopped. Believe me, a professional will not put up with a computer that "crashed every 45 mins, like clockwork." Macs under my care crashed maybe once a week, if that.
The other issue you probably ran into is that all three of those applications you listed are memory hogs, that want a heck of a lot of RAM each. My experience in school environments is that most computers, not just Macs, were running with bare minimum RAM set-ups... and that would cause all kinds of issues that could cause crashes. Getting a school administrator to sign-off on buying expensive RAM that could not be seen was very hard. Trying to run any two of them in multifinder as multitasking with insufficient RAM would really cause problems on a minimal system.
It is obvious to me that Macs in a student environment are going to have a lot of bad fonts to contend with. I am not surprised you had such issues. Clean out the font directories and use only professionally constructed fonts and install sufficient RAM and 98% of the problems would have gone away.
That being said, your experience with the 1990-2000 vintage Macs at a night school, is valueless when speaking about OSX Macs. OSX has no relationship with the operating system you were learning on. The Apple Macintosh operating system was rebuilt from scratch.
I have been running OSX since it was released in 2001... and in that time I have had three system crashes... two of which were in the first two months of OSX.0 in 2001... and that is with using upwards of TEN Macs! The Macs that I have now, a 2003 PowerMac G5 Tower (my main Mac), a 2000 PowerMac Dual G4 Tower, and a 2007 Pro Core 2 Duo Intel PowerBook, are on 24/7/365 and not one of them has crashed since I put them in service.
By-the-way, the publisher also ran some Windows PCs in the same era... and they crashed far more often than did the Macs... but from different reasons. They would handle the bad fonts pretty good... but the output was not as professional because that handling was sloppy.
Yeah, it was pretty easy.
Mark
How's that a problem? Is $39 for an additional 1GB too expensive? Then maybe $110 for 4GBs (two 2GB modules) would be too much? Buy your added memory from any of the well qualified third party RAM sellers out there. It'll work.
What does a gamer need with Office? You can open and save in Office format from iWork's Pages (wordprocessing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (presentation). That's only $79 (available on the web for $47). But if you insist on MS Office, the Mac version is available on line for as low as $131 and at Best Buy this week for $139.
The larger hard drive you might want is $149 extra from Apple for the 500GB but you can buy another from someone else for less. Disassembly is not that hard... but you can also buy a 1 TB external firewire drive for just a little more.... that can be partitioned to use Time Machine.
Sorry more expensive, less performance, plastic case. Failure.
Plastic case? What plastic case? Try anodized aircraft grade aluminum. More expensive? The all-in-one offerings from Dell, HP, and Gateway all feature slower processors, with smaller, lower-rez screens and more are expensive.
BTW, I worked on both PCs and Macs in grad school and in preparing for grad school between 1992 and 2001. The Macs were the ones with the fewest problems that required the least (or no) attention from the university IT department.
You were using MacOS 9 back then, a totally different operating system. You have no idea, no idea whatsoever, how much better things are with the latest versions of OS X.
-ccm
My first trips through there didn’t leave me with a good impression. But when I went back to hunt down hard drive recovery software, I got a good product recommended to me, and went back to get it the next week (after trying to find a better price online), I noticed (again) how busy the store is all the time, and saw the kid-sized computer table and chairs. Suddenly I realized I was smiling and enjoying my wait. That’s something I’ve literally never experienced before, anywhere.
I really enjoyed the fact that there wasn’t a pounding soundtrack (or more than one) as in the big electronics retail chain stores.
I used MACs at a graphic arts night school, in ‘98, to learn PhotoShop, Illustrator and Quark Express, and they crashed every 45mins, like clockwork. We spent more time reloading software than we did learning
. . . but of course, Macs now are an entirely different breed of cat than they were a decade ago. Then, the hardware was incompatible with Wintel and the OS was, what - 7.0 or 8.0?Now the hardware supports Windows apps (if you need them) and the OS is industrial strength (Leopard gets UNIX 03 certification) with a Steve Jobs shell.
OSX runs for weeks and months between crashes. Applications may die, but they rarely bring down the system if they do. Command/Option/Escape gets you a menu listing your open apps which tells which apps aren't responding, and allows you to force them to quit. Just restart them and carry on - sometimes from where you were when the crash occurred.
That’s the way to treat her. Don’t take no crap from nobody. If she doesn’t buy the brand of car you want her to, do you flatten her tires?
No, I set the car and garage on fire, and hang disemboweled small animals on her front door.
Mark
All valid and good points, sir. But my lowly PC didn’t have any of those problems running all that software at work, with only 1mb RAM, and the output was fine.
I wish the Bradley Academy has you in that MAC Lab, way back then...
I’m about to find out, later this week. A friend’s son, who is a high-end photographer type, has invited his dad/me to the studio-lab he has, to look over his hardware/software, since his dad wants to upgrade his PC stuff to match his kids. Should be an interesting morning visit for both of us.
That was true back then, but ever since the MacOS went to the BSD Unix-based Mach kernel with MacOS X things have gotten way better, thanks to the Mach kernel's vastly superior memory management! The latest Macs are actually very full-featured machines with very high-level hardware that would take a huge sum of money for a Windows machine to match in terms of hardware. All I need is to use my Logitech MX500 mouse pointer (which is supported by MacOS X 1.30.9 or later natively) and the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (both with USB connections) and I'm all set to go!
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