Alas poor Mac, I knew thee well

[MrTAToad]

The final Mac in the house literally went out with a bang earlier today - for some reason yesterday, it started shutting down on its own according every few minutes, with a slight smell coming out of it.

It looked like it was overheating, probably with the fan not working.  As with everything Mac, it would have cost a lot to get someone to even look at it, and so after it completely failing, it'll be replaced by a PC.

[erico]

sorry to hear about that...
but it´s quite scary as macs cost 3x their US dollar price in Brazil...
and if for ipad I plan to make apps, I will have to set a fortune buying them, that´s the reason I have been studying statistics...it has to pay off for such expensive equip...

[MrTAToad]

It had been going for well over 3 years, so its not too bad!  It was my mothers machine unfortunately, which was annoying.  However, we have at last got rid of the last Apple product, so its not too bad

[Ian Price]

[MrTAToad]

At least I've managed to start the transfer of some Mac game accounts to the PC

[bigsofty]

That sucks, damn Apple stuff is a pain  to replace as it's so damn expensive.

[Hatonastick]

Welcome to the world of forced upgrades due to dying equipment.  My old laptops graphics card went kapow recently and so I've now got a brand spanking new desktop which has resulted in my being forced into the world of Windows 7 64-bit (AMD phenom something with 6gb RAM and an ATI HD Radeon 5770).  I'm still installing/transferring things and it's been over 2 weeks now.  Currently I'm installing (5th attempt now) the steaming pile of dog snot that is known as Valve's Steam -- which just as I typed that actually finished and run for the first time.  Ugh...

Anyway best of luck.  Glad to see it's not just Windows PCs that are a pain in the butt.  Hopefully the new computer lives up to expectations (when you get it).

[Ian Price]

I've never had a problem installing STEAM - on my Windows 7 machine or others.

I've loved Windows 7 since I first started using it. There are some things I don't like - Live Mail (shudder), MSPaint (I had to grab my old XP version) and SoundRecorder is now shite (so grabbed that from XP too). But other than that, it's all good with no problems (and no Windows crashes) in over a year.

[Kitty Hello]

For sound I use Audacity. The interface is quite rubbish, but it does what I need.

MSPaint is a true pain. Someone really should rewrite MSPaint, and make the source available. I wand pan with middle mouse button and zoom with mouse wheel, and RGB(255,0,128) in the palette. Heck, even save the palette to the registry.

I'm really looking forward to win7, though.

[Ian Price]

Audacity is good, but sometime (believe it or not) SoundRecorder is better for .WAV.

MSPaint DOES have RGB (255,0,128) in the palette automatically.

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[Kitty Hello]

Yes. XP Paint. The Vista one stopped. How stupid is that, changing the default palette of a standard program...

[Wampus]

Some time ago I did some online window shopping and did a comparison of the Mac Mini with what I could get with the same money (plus taxes). This is what I printed out after my virtual shopping:-

Win 7 Desktop: i3-540 3.06Ghz, 4GB DDR3 1600 memory, Radeon HD 5670, 1GB hard drive, 10X Bluray-RW, Win7 Professional and high-quality PSU and case.

Apple Mac Mini: P8600 2.40GHz, 2GB DDR3 1066 memory, Nvidia GeF 320M, 320GB hard drive, 8X DVD-RW, MacOSX.6 and very high-quality/quiet case.

I had to buy a Mac Mini for development purposes. I just like to torture myself with stuff like that above. I could probably do much better than an i3-540 now too, for the money.

Hatonastick, ALL computers are a pain in the butt. I have to say though, after setting up a few Win7 computers I'm actually looking forward to using it and going 64bit after the New Year. It'll break compatibility with a lot of apps I'm sure, but I can have a WinXP partition for legacy apps and I could really need more than 3GB of working memory with the amount of concurrent apps I like to run.

[MrTAToad]

The initial problem caused more problems than originally thought - it damaged the memory of my machine (Windows 8 memory check kept crashing and machine itself kept turning off) which in turn damaged the motherboard (no display)

Ordered a fast but cheap machine now...

[okee]

MSPaint is a true pain. Someone really should rewrite MSPaint

Why not use paint.net ?

[Hatonastick]

I've never had a problem installing STEAM - on my Windows 7 machine or others.

I've loved Windows 7 since I first started using it. There are some things I don't like - Live Mail (shudder), MSPaint (I had to grab my old XP version) and SoundRecorder is now shite (so grabbed that from XP too). But other than that, it's all good with no problems (and no Windows crashes) in over a year.

I think the problem was due to network issues.  Turns out I wasnt the only one having trouble installing it recently -- guess they took some hammering recently, or maybe it was some network issue somewhere along the line.  In any case, it finally worked a few days ago and Ive not had any trouble with it since.