I recently aquiared a new computer. A PC! *gasp* Psyjax running a PC!!! Ya, it's my toy , know thy enamy and all that.

Not a replacement for my dual G4, just a fun computer to tinker with. I partitioned the harddrive and have a small 5GB assigned to Win98SE (ugh!). The rest is given over to RedHat linux 8 That being 35GB or so.

Here are my impressions of the modern PC coming from a Mac Zelot's perspective (mind you, I haven't fully owned a PC since the old 486, though I have used them extensively up to this point):

First off PC's are cheep when you build them yourself. I put mine together from midrange parts to end up with a relatively up to date system. The CPU was about 400 total, and the rest of the periferals and software I bought ran it up to about 700. (speakers, keyboard, ram, a couple of games, etc.) So, theres a good thing.

I was ready to install my OS's. At this point I was ready to find out what it is I pay for, when I get a Mac. I mean 700 bucks for a 2100+Athalon XP, 256MB of DDR RAM, GeForce 4, man, how can you beat a price like that?

First off, let me just point out that the hardware design on the PC feels ancient. It is ancient, hasen't really evolved since the early days, at least the layout. Booting the sucker up feels like your turning on a Model T.

First thing's first, I will install windoze (as I understand it, it likes to be first on a dual boot setup). I needed a bootdisk... why you can't just boot off a CD is a Windoze quirk I will never understand.

So I dug out my old IIsi box and rumaged around and found a box of dusty old diskets. Just touching one of those archaic little suckers made me wince. Years of I/O errors, coruptions, compressed files divided amongst them, yuck.

In any case, I got on my roomates PC and made a bootdisk from bootdisk.com, started the comp. up and loged into the CD, typed Setup and off wen't the windoze installer. Pice of cake right? Wrong!

Boot from a CD in the Mac and the best installer in the world comes up. Windoze is not this. First off it assumes it's going to work and gives you very limeted choices of what to install, most notably there is no way to avoid MSN or IE being vomited onto your HD.

In any case, my first install attempt crashed the installer. reboot from blue screen. My second attempt went all the way thrugh except that for some dumb ass reason it had created two drive partitions one FAT16 one FAT32!

May I say that filesystems for windoze are idiotic at best, excruciatingly confusing and obtuse at worst.

Reboot from disk, FDISK, Delete, Format for large drives. Run setup, ok it installs all the way again. My fav. thing about the installer is this dialogue that says if this is takeing to long reboot. HAHAHAHAH! WTF, the os dosn't even know if it fucked up?

Ok so I'm in! Windoze boots fine... and it's, it's.... 16 colors and 640x480. hmmmmmmmm....

Oh yes! That's right, I have to manualy install every single fucking driver for every ity bitty component I have. Motherboard driver, make sure windoze realizes it has an AGP slot, pice of dumb shit. Anyway, while installing my Mobo drivers IE crashes takeing windoze down. Now everytime I reboot it trys to update the system and hangs. Can't get out of the vicious cycle.

Reboot from disk, Format c: re-install. This time I put in IErradicator, remove IE and install all my drivers. After some trial and error getting them to work, Windoze 98SE is up and running. A total of 3.5hrs. It's sooooo easy to use! YAY!

Win98SE is more unstable than OS9 ever was. Sorry, it's just plain true. A bit snappir here and there, but crashes all the time for no reason. None the less, it get's the job done for what I use it for. Old DOS games, and some new stuff the Mac dosn't have yet. It was nice to be able to dig up gems in the bargain Bin.

I installed CodeWarrior, and toyed with some Win32 programming. What a dumb API. That's all I have to say about that.

Ok, now on to a real Man's OS! RedHat 8. I decided to Defrag windoze. This took for ever, and I was surprised to see, that even a freshly installed system speckled the HD with data. It was all over the place! I have never seen a Mac, after being used for years, have this extreme fragmentation. Jezus.

I used FIPS and cut the disk in two.

Worked fine. But RedHat 8 in, set the BIOS to load the CD and finaly a modern, fully featured, easy to use installer booted up. All wen't well till I got to the partitioning part, it still considered that the new partition was a windoze partition and woulden't install on it. So I had to use Druid to manualy configure the ext3 stuff. Only a minor headache, luckely I'm familiar enugh with Linux to set up a swap and boot partition.

What else is there to say, it recognized all my hardware. (except my geforce 4, I had to select the driver from a menu). In no time I was up and running. BTW GRUB is an awsome bootloader!

I emidiatly gravitated to KDE, it feels soooo much better than GNOME. I love it, Linux is the closest thing to OSX on a PC. It's not as well designed, and has more than a few rugh spots, but it's lightyears more advanced than windoze.

I installed Kdevelop, and was impresed. Very nice IDE. It ws fun toung some classic ANSI C stuff. Funny thing was, running linux for a while made me wan't to programm!

I have programed on Mac's for years, but now I feel this incredible drive to programm for linux. Any suggestion on where to start? Are there any good C graphic librarys APIs that are well documented. My current project is a neat graphical rogulike game, and it would be awsome to be able to port it to all the sytems.

Well, that's that. Linux is the bomb. But GUI wise, OSX still ownz.

So what do I pay for in my Mac? Simply, quality, ease of use. Assurance that my computer will allways do what I tell it to do. Is it worth it? 100% . I like all computers, but the Mac is still my fav. If apple goes under, I wont ever touch a comp. again.