I’m seriously considering finally jettisoning PCs and changing to Apple. I’m sick of the constant crashes and other problems with Windows. My main questions on this concern compatibility with all of my Word and Excel files. Is this going to be an issue? What about reading Word documents sent from a PC? I’m assuming that Outlook won’t work on an Apple. Is there an Apple email program that’s similar? Actually, I have email on my iPad, so I guess there is.
Are there other problems that I’m not thinking of?
Microsoft Outlook and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite exist and work fine on a mac. There is a native mail client as well. All of your word and excel files will be fine, but there is a non-trivial possibility of compatibility issues if you use advanced formatting or complex macros. Most documents will look identical, but not necessarily all.
I can’t recommend this, because while OpenOffice is powerful it doesn’t have a particularly polished interface. In addition, the big new thing is a fork of OpenOffice known as LibreOffice.
Whilst I use neither Microsoft nor Apple, I honestly believe moving to Apple would be a vast improvement — regarding Microsoft Office files, you could install LibreOffice, or it’s brother OpenOffice, both for free and they read most files; or there’s Microsoft Office for Mac, which is not free, but obviously works much the same way as on a PC.
Well, I would argue that Office for Mac is a terrible piece of software. It’s better than nothing, but I wouldn’t buy it personally. What I did instead was do an install of Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp and I generally virtualize (instead of running it natively) using VMWare Fusion. I then installed a copy of WordPerfect Suite in the 8.1 partition because I can’t stand the Ribbon. Unfortunately, Corel doesn’t make a Mac version of WordPerfect Suite.
You can get at least some support in OS X for those files without needing Office. But it’s not great.
I use Macs when I have the opportunity, but I use Macs and PCs running Windows 7 & 8 routinely.
If you’re using a semi-modern computer running Windows 7 or 8 and experiencing “constant crashes”, you might be better served by finding out what’s unique about your setup that’s causing them.
I can only remember a handful of occasions in recent years that my computer crashed and they occur with equal frequency on OS X. The important point though is that if your computer is crashing constantly in 2015, there’s a problem you need to fix. The OS is extremely stable.
Unfortunately in my experience, Microsoft’s Office suite for Mac is easily the worst part of using a Mac. It’s buggy and actually does crash very frequently. It’ll open all your files but I find it very unpleasant to use. Even when it’s not actually crashing, of the many minor design differences between Office for Mac and Office for Windows, virtually all tally on the negative side for Mac.
Apple has a simple e-mail app but it doesn’t do the vast majority of things Outlook does, if you’re used to using Outlook in an Exchange environment.
It’s a fairly recent purchase (within 3 years), running W7-64. I’ve been getting frequent BSOD crashes and of course Windows Error Reporting is useless. I’ve opened the case and blown out all the dust and dirt and operating temps are within normal parameters. I have Malwarebytes, and AVG antivirus, use Windows firewall and it all runs through a router. I have the BSOD results, but have had no luck getting to the nub of the problem. Most recent crash was this morning. I’ve got everything backed up to an external drive, but it’s really annoying not to be able to fix the problem.
There’s also the seating of the RAM ( and of course, minutely loose connections anywhere: I once had the devil of a time changing SATA cables until I realised that two of the SATA sockets were bad little SATA sockets. This is an ASUS board actually. )
if you’re getting constant crashes, then something is wrong with your system (and it isn’t Windows.) I’m on year 5 of my current desktop and it’s never blue screened, and the only program crashes I’ve had have been from known bugs.
Office for Mac is more or less fully-featured compared with Windows Office. there might be some hiccups here and there but it’s the way to go. LibreOffice is a sad, sad joke.
you need to run a more intensive memory diagnostic like memtest86.
i sure appreciate the increased stability and increased performance of some Linux (Ubuntu or a variant).
LibreOffice is a office suite that will do Microsoft Office documents (might depend on version and content).
there are equivalent applications in that world. there are very few things that i like better versions or actions in Windows. due to the increased stability i’ve learned to work with the few shortcomings.
also you can boot it off a CD to give it a trial without installing it.
you can also install it along with Windows and have a dual boot machine. at the start you get a menu for the operating system that you want to boot (you specify a defaukt to boot into in something like 10 seconds). i do this .
I agree that it’s worth it to call somebody. There must be some sort of independent computer shop somewhere in your area.
Before you do that you could take out one stick of ram at a time (if you have a manual, check to see in what order your motherboard prefers ram slots to be filled) and use your machine as normal. Give it a day or so, and decide whether or not taking out the one stick helped or not. If you remove one and get no BSOD for 2 days then voila! That was your bad ram! (You probably have 3x4GB? You will not have a problem running on 8GB at a time)
If that doesn’t find your problem then yes go to a local pro.
The crash problem isn’t daily. At one point it was three days in a row. The most recent was ten days between events. Maybe I’ll first check to make sure the RAM boards are firmly seated, then go from there. Or I could just buy new ones, which is certainly cheaper than a new PC.
Well, aside from the RAM there’s always the possibility the hard drive is going bad too. I’ll reiterate that modern OS’s like Win 7 and 8 are very stable these days and the majority of your crashes are going to come from hardware issues. Macs are made of the same hardware like any other computer (even moreso these days what with the intel chips), but they cost a lot more for the same power and capability…
I’ve also had the issue where windows was just installed badly from day 1. When I was younger I once got a laptop and didn’t just wipe and install the OS fresh as soon as I got it because I thought it was too much hassle. Plagued by BSOD for years, thought that was just what I had to deal with for being able to use an early Tablet PC. Turns out, Windows had simply been installed poorly at the factory and as soon as I wiped and reformatted, it never BSOD’d again until the onboard memory died.