PC OR MAC ?

The Caps story is quite well known and it's ALL of the larger MB caps
that go and it was only the cheap caps that went, the more expensive
caps such as Rubycon (from whom the formula was stolen) never go.
One repairer has stated that he has never seen a motherboard with
faulty Rubycon caps on it.

The MB manufactures such as AOPEN that always used top Japanese caps
never had any problems. Abit had big problems along with DELL and Apple.

Abit were the first to start free repairs on MB's. If you look
at a box for a recent Abit MB it says something like Contains Top
Quality Solid Japanese Made Capacitors.

I was just pointing out that Apple don't always use the top components
available. Just noticed on that link to the firm that supply caps:

"It is recommended that you recap or replace your PSU (power supply unit) with a new one if it wasn't replaced already by the now expired Apple extended warranty. There are too many revision of these PSU's for me to effectively make kits for them, so if you choose to recap your PSU, you'll have to disassemble it and purchase the individual caps you need to rebuild it."

I've not heard much about PS's being affected.

I'm surprised they expired the Warranty considering it was
a manufacturing fault that they could be sued over. They only
started to repair the boards when they were threatened with
a Class Action Suite.

It's not a big job changing the caps on a MB I did it on a
Soltek board because it's the only one I've got that's still
got an ISA socket.

I already mentioned Apple replaced the logic board free of charge on my Imac... when it was WAYYY past warranty....

I use both but much prefer to use the Mac whenever possible because it's just nicer and more intuitive to use.

Seemed I inferred right
Sadly for Mac users there is no hardware difference anymore besides that they are mostly lacking behind.
Just take the new Air... why did they use a 2 year old processor, why not an i3 or i5?
I wonder how long it will take before they will use Sandy Bridge.
And when will the Mac have USB3, SATA3 and blu-ray support?
Certainly Blu-Ray is already out for years, i've it in my PC for 2 years now

That's only one....
What about Maya, 3D max, Catia and Nupas Cadmatic?
If you're in 3D there is just little sense to use Mac

You touch on a point I think is worth expanding upon here:

One of the computer related topics that crops up all the time is effective data backup. I am a big believer in a multi-tiered approach but given one of the few certainties in life is that hard disks will fail at some point, I believe Raid arrays should be a requisite part of this; they are highly effective and relatively cheap and simple to set up if planned in advance.

In practice that planning merely requires buying a computer cased in something that has plenty of physical space for hard disks (a minimum of 4, preferably 5+ for added flexibility) and a motherboard with onboard Raid and plenty of SATA ports to connect your hard disks to. Even the latter is not strictly necessary since you can buy cheap and cheerful raid cards that won’t deliver top notch performance but will give you a string of SATA ports.

Certainly most off the shelf Dells, PC World specials, etc will fail to meet this requirement. But so will all iMacs. Mac Pros start get into territory where you can rig something half decent together but they certainly also cost a pretty penny, and I have a feeling you are tied in on the hardware side.

And Apple aficionados will hopefully note that whilst on this subject I have diplomatically refrained from delving into the Time Capsule debacle.

OT Chris – I always thought you were an html programmer

Funnily enought there were some comments out from the Leader just a few days ago; he said Intel didn't rate USB 3 so he wasn't a fan either.

Seemed I inferred right
Sadly for Mac users there is no hardware difference anymore besides that they are mostly lacking behind.
Just take the new Air... why did they use a 2 year old processor, why not an i3 or i5?
I wonder how long it will take before they will use Sandy Bridge.
And when will the Mac have USB3, SATA3 and blu-ray support?
Certainly Blu-Ray is already out for years, i've it in my PC for 2 years now

That's only one....
What about Maya, 3D max, Catia and Nupas Cadmatic?
If you're in 3D there is just little sense to use Mac [/quote]Well I am truly sorry you wasted your money on blue ray.
dvd was the last of the mainstream shiny disc formats.
between legal downloads, wireless streaming and upconverted dvd's, and flash drives, blue ray was doomed from the start. It is nice that the pc world finally got usb3 and sat3 to keep up with firewire 400 and 800 drives.... hell there was nothing you pee cee'ers could buy in usb2 that could keep up with the firewire 400 that came on my old emac.... especially for editing video.... until last year that is....

Alrighty...

Don in case you didn't know, PC also have firewire 400 and 800 for years, I even have a Display port now.
Streaming still isn't there although we will get fiberglass next year but we are one of the few here in the Netherlands and in the world for that matter.
Internet isn't ready for the demand at the moment and i don't want to wait for hours till i can watch a movie.

Seems I've come to this debate quite late, although 5 pages since yesterday is going some - def a hot topic!

I've often had a similar question going round in my head too, use PC at the mo but should I buy a Mac? I'm running what should be a pretty powerful set-up up; quad core 2.66ghz, Win7 with 6GB RAM, yet it sometimes struggles with PS work, which these days is doing more and more stitching work. If I try to do anything else at the same time it will crash without fail...

Just done a full reformat and reload of Win7 and things are better. What else can I do to try to keep the performance up at a reasonable level?

Are there particular bits of software that I need to be avoiding, I'm pretty careful about what I load on or download?

True, it's not just Apple. Its a common problem. A certain IBM server I used to work with had mobo failures, all happened at roughly the same time, a capacitor failed. All the capacitors bought at the same time, failed at the same time.

Ditto an HP monitor and a certain Allied Telesyn router too.

Its not uncommon and not restricted to one manufacturer.

I'm using a PC running Ubuntu (8.04 at the moment). 99% of the photo work is done using UFRAW (convert PEF to JPG, small adjustments).

Definetely a hot topic!

I think everyone should use whatever they are happier with. I have used both PCs and Macs, and I only use Macs at home now. (and I still have a Windows laptop at work). for me, life with a Mac is just so much easier, I used to be the pc support guy at home, but since we have Macs I am out of my job....

Generally the feeling is they used the Core 2 Duo because they get to pair it with an OpenCL capable GPU. If they paired it with the standard Intel GPU, OpenCL support would be lost (and it would be the only Mac in the current lineup without OpenCL support), and if they did what they do on the high-end MBPs (have the Intel GPU *and* an nVidia part), the powerdrain would increase, not to mention they'd need a bigger motherboard, and thus less space for batteries...

As to *why* Apple are so insistent on making sure all current machines support OpenCL... no idea

Apple and Microsoft have very different philosphies to their customer base.

Microsoft try and keep backwards compatibility and IMHO this has crippled their machines, the file system in particular, they are also very open to user upgrades, this means you can build a PC with any array of components.

Apple don;t give a stuff to backwards compatibility and will happily say 'stuff you' to their customer base 'we are changine something and you need to buy a new machine' This means you need to upgrade a every 3 years or so or you are obviously being left behind. it does mean as technology moves they are not being held back.

Someone mentioned file system not being a big deal to the end user, if you want to work on large files then you will soon see the limitations of windows. I do a lot of audio recording on both a windows machine and mac, the mac just works the windows machine work if you religiously maintain its file system, re-format drives weekly or before new projects and defrag a couple of times a day. I would imagine video editing is a similar chore picture editing should not be much of an issue on either machine.

Macs are very nicely made (the case of my G5 sat next to me is a work of art) but and equivalent PC costs 1/2-2/3 of the money, is the cost a big issue to you?

If you want a laptop for photo editing PLEASE try and get a demo of the macbook pro with matte finished screen, it looks amazing. If I wanted a machine for photo editing and had very deep pockets that is probably what I would buy because of the general build quality and screen.

There is no real reason to go with either platform to be honest, I use both, mac G5 at work for general office duties, Mac G4 for image editing and web surfing at home, PC laptop with Win7 for general out and about use or sat on the sofa at home and an old desktop PC win XP for photoscanning. They all do the job required.

Not sure I'd go quite this far Look at Rosetta (PowerPC emulation on Intel) or Classic after the launch of OS X, for example. They tend to keep compatibility during the transition period, but once the transition period is over, all bets are off.