Question On Os Stability Of Windows Vs. Apple

Factual Questions
1

Note: I am not trying to start an argument here

Hi Everyone, Thanks for reading this.
Please note that i am no way a promoter of MS or Apple. I just got in an aurgument about this windows vs. apple OS stability with a friend of mine the other day and he wants me to prove my point by showing him some facts.

My point was (I’ve read about this long time ago but don’t have the web-links anymore) that Windows (not talking about win95 or 98, I know they are unstable, blue screens) 2000/XP is unstable not because of MS flaws (not security flaws) but because of the third party drivers and software we install in them. They make is more unstable.

His point was, MS sucks, thier OS sucks, and its unstable coz of its sucky programming. Also MAC OS is much better and more stable. (I know the latest MAC OS is based on unix and is very stable).

Plz reply with some links to support my points, or somethink related to it. And also plz correct me if I am wrong myself.

Thanks a lot in advance…

2

It’s true that one of the reasons for Windows problems is that Windows platforms have to support a much wider range of hardware than Apple Mac platforms. Many Macs are sold like iMacs in an essentially un-modifiable package, which can be bundled with a standard set of drivers. In contrast, PC systems are pulled together from a wide range of off-the-shelf components, and it becomes much harder to test compatibility over all of them.

Also, there is much more software available for Windows, which creates greater opportunity for conflicts and catastrophes.

In addition, the Windows 95/98 architecture was created to include a good measure of backward compatibilty and to run on low-specced systems (compared to the more robust NT), which makes it more complex and means it includes fewer safety systems (like the absence of proper memory protection in 95). In contrast, Mac OS X is not at all backwards compatible.

3

Brief account of some Windows 9x design decisions

4

This is getting less true as time goes on, though. Modern Macs will take any brand of hard drive and memory, and I think that sound and video cards might be off-the-shelf, too. And isn’t Windows XP non-backwards-compatible, in the same manner as OSX?

5

Windows XP requires new drivers for hardware, hence any hardware running by the system has been, to some extent, designed for Windows XP. However, it should run on much the same system that would have been running Windows 98 two years previous. The largest cause of stability problems in PC systems is, in my experience, the motherboard, followed closely by poor RAM. Most other components either work or don’t, or work but fail early.

6

My mac G4 has lots of off-the-shelf, non-Apple hardware. That is, hard drive, cd burner, external hard drive and enclosure, usb hub, scanner, printer, memory stick reader and also a cable modem. Every bit of that hardware could be used on a Windows machine. On my mac it all works without a hitch. I run the latest OS X 10.2.6 at home on that machine, and I haven’t had to restart the machine, literally, since I loaded that system software roughly 2 months ago. Previous to that I had run OS X 10.1.5, and did have to restart it a couple of times because of freezes during the 9 months or so that I used it.

In contrast, at work I use a P4 Compaq with Windows XP, hooked solely to a printer, no other hardware, and I have restarted it 4 times TODAY.
I will say that previous to OS X, the mac machines did have bugs and freezes, but even during the OS 8 or 9 days, I never had problems rivalling my daily grind here at work.

But that’s just me! I’m not fanning flames!

7

I suppose your view could change depending upon what you’re trying to do with each. I work with Windows 2000 Server and run Mac OS X on my G3 iBook. Subjectively, I think my Mac “crashes” more. The OS X never completely crashes, but applications frequently crash, especially those in classic. Classic also crashes for no apparent reason as well.

That said, I put much more on my Mac in terms of use and load than my Windows machine. I have to restart my Mac about once a week.

8

Really its more a matter of what applications you use and how you use them that will determine how often your machine crashes. Sure, bad drivers or hardware can cause this too, but the majority of stuff out there works fine, its more often the users and applications that cause problems.

9

I have no experience with OS X, but previous mac OS systems used to crash like anything (1-2 day). However, in 10 years of mac ownership never had to reinstall the system. It always bounced back. My XP system works for weeks without a hitch, but when it goes I am in big trouble and have had to roll back twice and reinstall once in 6 months.

10

Here’s my anecdotal experience, for what it’s worth, and a grain of salt to take with it:

• Windows 2K and XP are pretty solid shortly after bootup but get funkier and funkier the longer they are up until some app takes down a set of drivers or dll’s or whatever and you have to reboot to get rid of the totally weird artifacts and the growing collection of things that don’t work. Also, some applications are just plain buggy and trash the OS environment, especially RealPlayer, Word (yeah, surprisingly enough) and QuickTime (Apple’s revenge? Bill’s deliberate incompatibility scheme? Whatever. QT on MS sucks). The Ctrl-Alt-Del process manager itself is extremely robust and nearly always comes up when you invoke it.

• MacOS X is solid as a rock as an OS, but a great many of the applications that run on it are fragile as hell and crash if you so much as look at them crosseyed. Probably this is because many of them were ported to OS X without much quality control, and the situation will hopefully improve. Meanwhile, if you’re a Unix afficionado, the Darwin underbelly and its apps are pretty much bulletproof, crashwise, but you can spend a week trying to get them to work especially if you’re starting off with sourcecode. Unlike XP and 2K, OS X’s Cmd-Alt-Escape process manager can be rendered unavailable depending on what processes died, although you can ssh from another box and do command-line surgery.

• MacOS 9 and 8 are better than they ought to be considering they have no protected memory and no preemptive multitasking. If you reboot at least every 12 hours you can go a long time without crashes, and 95% of the crashes you do experience will be related to web browsers and errant webpage code. Like an old Volkswagen in a sea of Daimlers, a Mac on one of these older OS’s keeps perking along and with far fewer “moving parts” is easier to fix when it goes wonky. If you take the time time learn what apps are solid and what extensions and control panels play nicely with each other – a nontrivial endeavor – you end up with something more solid than Windows 95 or 98 and not much short of NT. You have to tailor and prune to get it there though. Also, crashes on MacOS 8/9 are hardly ever more than irritating: you reboot and everything is fine. Crashes on either modern Windows (2K/XP) or MacOS X, while rare, can wreak serious havoc.

11

AHunter3’s post are almost always reasonable, and most of my experiences with Mac/Windows are the same.

Remember when it comes to crashes it’s really the OS you’re worried about.

On Windows XP I’ve only managed to crash the OS a few times. It’s impressive since I’m really a vehement Windows non-liker. But, it starts acting strange if it’s not restarted every couple of days. Oddly enough, the older Windows 2000 at work never needs to be restarted, except when the IT guys send a forced update.

I’m playing with running XP under Suse 8.2 now, and I’m trying not to reboot the box at all to see if the OS is better or if my homebuilt box is just a peice of junk. I only have two weeks left on the VMWare demo, though, so I won’t get a really good look at if XP is any better running under this particular virtual hardware. However since VMWare costs more than XP, I don’t think I’ll buy it even if it is better.

My Mac, though, has programs crash all the time. This usually means the application did something wrong and that the OS is doing a good thing by killing the app. I can think of only two times I’ve ever crashed the OS, and they were both in the last week. For some reason using BBEdit Lite recently is causing kernel panics!

12

I supplement my normal “stable” income by contracting myself as a computer technician to personal users and small businesses, so I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff people do with their computers. Not that this qualifies me more than anyone else, I just wanted to let everyone know where I was coming from.

I get few Mac troubleshooting questions from customers. Now, this may be because I market myself solely as Windows-based technician, and the customer is too desperate to notice that. But it might also be Macs have fewer problems. To complicate it more, if I do a mental estimation of Windows problems versus Mac problems, it falls pretty much in the 95 percent to 5 percent ratio - the same we are told as the respective market shares (approximately). Basically, my jury is out on Macs, so let’s move on.

The first thing I tell my customers is that their computer, just like their automobile and the roof on their house, will require periodic maintenance in order to stay at 100 percent performance. The notion that a computer is just another appliance, like a toaster, is far too wide-spread, and I battle it daily.

…

Okay, I just reread my posting so far, and I’m rambling. So let’s get to the point, and wrap it up.

I believe that this debate boils down to what has already been said in a previous posting: Windows is more versatile and diversified, and thus more unstable, than Macs. It’s a trade-off. Do you want choices or stability? Most of the problems that I fix deal directly with the user choosing the wrong option from a multitude of choices.

Without going into the internal problems of each respective company, they seem to occupy the opposite extreme ends of the “Hands-On / Hands-Off” graph. Mac is hands on. They have direct authority in exactly what can and cannot go into their computers - so everything works. Microsoft is completely different. They simply provide a platform, as if to say, “Hey, if you can get it to work, more power to you.” Microsoft is more marketable, so a third party vendor who is trying to break into the market will have a better survival chance in programming their hardware and software towards PCs. Microsoft does provide a Hardware Compatibility List (www.microsoft.com/hcl), but this is more of a suggestion than a guideline, because they disavow all responsibilty.

Memory and allocation of resources within any computer is paramount to how well the system works. These needs and guidelines have changed through time, so compatibility problems are inevitable. Asked by a customer why they could not use their digital camera with their Windows 95 computer, my reply was because digital cameras were not invented yet. XP, in contrast, recognizes the digital camera as a removable storage device. Very nice.

I remember when I had a Mac back in the mid 90’s. I cracked open the case to see about updating some of the hardware. Impossible. I haven’t been able to crack open a Mac lately, so I would like to know if the newest Macs are more technician friendly than previous generations.

13

I’ve cracked open almost every Mac I’ve had. The SE I never had occasion to open. The Colour Classic (yeah, with the “u” in Color) was for replacing a hard drive – 80MB was just getting so cramped… it was a pain in the butt. The 636CD had a lot of ample room, but all I did was install a hard-to-find internal modem. The PowerMac 6400 was super easy – standard tower configuration and I did a lot of work on the inside – video cards, G3 upgrades, and so on. The iMac was a pain in the butt, too, not to mention replacing all my SCSI stuff with USB and FireWire – replacing the paltry 13GB drive was a nerve-wracking task. The PowerBook Bronze was a dream to add memory and change the internal drive compared to my previous CTX and Acer laptops. Finally the G4 is genuine pleasure. The way it opens up and has so much space for everything is the way everything should be. None of the other Mac compare. So… yeah, Macs are a lot easier to work on.

In way of comparison, my work-given HP Pavilion was always too cramped. I literally had to disassemble parts of the case frame in order to access certain parts of the motherboard and to plug in the dang CD audio cable! My current homemode x86 box with a generic case is much, much better – once the covers are off and a couple of screws are out, it kind of swings open making access substantially better than the old HP. Still not as nice as the Mac, but paying Mac prices means getting Mac details (like paying for a Lincoln gets you Lincoln details).

Also, virtually all of the components these days – other than the motherboard proper – are off the shelf items that work in x86 boxes just as well. Hard drives, memory, video cards (if you don’t want ADC), and so on.

14

Not necessarily. The Mac community is both smaller and also closer-knit, and if you build for the Mac platform first, your new software release comes in as one of a couple thousand rather than one in a dozen million. The Mac user community hops all over good software and the magazines and web sites review it and you get a good rep and a test-bed. Then you port to the PC platform and dump your promotional money on behalf of a product that’s already been field-tested and which already has some momentum and reputation from success on the Mac platform. That’s the way it has worked with many products, both commercial and shareware.

Well, the opening part is easier.

On the G4 towers, you pull a little ring-tab and the whole side drops down and gives you access to the drive bays and RAM. The PCI slots should be right there as well. (You don’t need to remove cables or anything. Shutting down is generally a good idea though ;)). But if by “updating some of the hardware” you mean swapping out the circuitboards for fast 3rd-party items you picked up at a trade show, generally no.

PowerBooks and iMacs are a bit more trouble to get into. You don’t need a case cracker though, those days are long over.

15

How big of a selection, and which 3rd party vendor items work well inside of the newer Macs? How hard is it to find these items? I’m asking because I’ve never researched this before.

A credit to Apple. They invented the following (add on any that you wish):

USB (someone remind me of the numerical designations of these two).
Firewire (Apple gets a royalty of one dollar for every Firewire product sold).
SCSI.
A multitude of the first wireless computer products.
The Mouse (this is tricky because Xerox actually invented it, but Apple owns everything about it).

16

I really think Intel invented USB, wasn’t it?
Apple only gets licensing for products that use the FireWire name. Sony, for example uses “iLink” (I think) and everyone else that wants to avoid the license calls is IEEE-1394. I think Apple may have even reduced that $1 amount in the last year or two. It was more important to them that it be an open standard than a huge profit center.

Apple did invent the desktop metaphor operating system, which is probably the most important invention in the last 20 years. Sure, the idea was borrowed (say stolen if you must) from Xerox/PARC, but it’s quite a leap from an application on top of an OS to a complete graphical OS. The PARC publishing system was like Windows 3.x running as an application atop of DOS – the base OS wasn’t the GUI.

In any case, any AGP/PCI/USB/SCSI/FireWire device can work in a Mac. Of course there’s the matter of drivers, relegating “can work” to “in theory.” ATI and nVidia come to mind. Creative Labs does/did make a better-than-stock sound card for the Mac. There are all sorts of smaller companies that either resell PC PCI cards for the Mac with their own drivers, or make them both. IDE hard drives are universal, and higher-end Macs have off-the-shelf SCSI cards. A great number of USB and FireWire items work without a vendor driver, especially those that support at least generic standards.

That aside, you still have some problems with proprietary parts of the mobo. But I hear that said about Sony, Compaq, and other PC manufacturers. You may not be able to disable the internal sound card in the BIOS, but that doesn’t matter because the OS is smart enough to let you pick. You won’t be able to buy a new motherboard from a different manufacturer. You won’t officially be able to upgrade the processor on a whim.

17

Chicago Faucet, get yourself to your local computer store, and ask the salesman to open the case of a G4 tower and show you. You will cry tears of joy. It’s truly beautiful, the way they arranged everything in there, and all components are easily accessible.

Of course, the same cannot be said of any of the iMacs or the cubes, but that’s to be expected. Just not enough room in those cases.

18

I tend to find that most people who crash either OS X or XP are abusing their computers. I have found XP to be exceedingly stable, and even when software crashes, it keeps itself together, recovering very often from bad software.

19

I have yet to have XP crash on me at all which is more then I can say for what I had as its predecessor (Win ME of which I shall say no more), so I’ve been very happy with the OS. I do turn off my system every night so if any problems only become apparent after extended periods of time I wont see them.

As for individual applications, on my system kazaa lite (frequently) and Agent (occasionally) are the applications I’ve had most trouble from.

20

Just personal experience, but I can say that on good quality hardware, windows XP can be extremely stable. I’ve run for well over a week, using various programs, multitasking, etc, and don’t have any trouble. Most of the stability problems that people have with windows is from poor quality power supplies (common on Compaq, HP), and poor quality memory.