Why would you Run Windows on a MAC?

well tests show it is faster on a mac than pc, see here

I do it to test web pages to make sure they work in IE. That way I can do everything on one computer.

In short, some applications are only available for one OS or another.

If you require such applications, you’re stuck needing the OS it’s on. It’s not just a Mac vs. Windows thing. Some apps are only available for Linux, or z/OS, or IBM VM/CMS, etc, etc, etc.

No, the Apple computer is like the Benz and the other computer is like the Chrysler. They now have mostly the same parts, but the operating system that runs all the software is different. Running Windows on an Apple computer is useful for windows applications you can’t get for a Mac. Mostly Internet Explorer 7 or 8, and a bunch of games. OS is the MAJOR difference between them. The ram, hard drive, everything underneath is now very similar. If the Mac running Windows is faster than a Dell, for example, its only an unnoticeable few percent.

do you have some benchmarks to back up that last statement @charbdys ?

@charbdys, all the test i have seen have shown very noticeable differences in speed, i will try to find them, gimme some time

look at this for now, ill find more

here

Usually I’m pretty particular about benchmarks but here’s the first I found:
http://www.macworld.com/article/50321/2006/04/xpbenchmarks.html

Here the difference is pretty insignificant. Also they didn’t test games, which are usually pretty good overall benchmarks. And the Macs could very well do better at those, but I’m guessing not, cause you can get a gaming laptop with SLI cards, just not from Apple.

If you can find better, thorough, fair benchmarks, I’d like to see.

I boot into windows when I scan my books for college. MS Office document scanning on Windows is way better than anything I’ve come across for my mac. If Office 2008 had something similar I guess I wouldn’t have any reason to use windows.

there were some i read in popular mechanics, and wired magazine. but i cant find them on their online sites. ill keep looking

and i just looked at your link, and they look pretty significant to me, although im not familiar with computer performance tests so i dont know what type of difference constitutes significant

2%-6%, on office tasks? Useless; only a good stopwatch would notice. The ONLY place that you would notice is the video encoding tasks, and there the PC is equal or faster. Even a 20% difference can matter very little depending what the task is.

My view about computers is this: like all tools, what you do with it is more important than what it is. A good artist/programmer/writer can do more with a $500 generic Walmart PC than someone with a $10000 “god box” but no skills. So do cool stuff and don’t worry about inconsequential things.

the problem with your argument is that what matters is the path you take to do the things you do, and i find it hard to believe that someone will defend the microsoft user experience over the apple one

I’m not defending MS. However much Mac’s “just work” they also “just break”. Enough have broken for my family and friends that I don’t have any delusions about them. PC’s suck, and Mac’s usually suck too, sometimes just a wee bit less. I don’t want to turn this into a pissing contest, cause Mac vs PC is so 2005, and 1997, and 1984. BTW they were cool in 1984.

The so-called “apple user experience” certainly has some good points, but like Windows does some things that are so f*cking annoying that they lose all credit with me.

@charybdys, your point is certainly valid, as I experienced recently.

I’m still firmly in the Mac camp (natch!), but I agree it ain’t perfect over here. The grass is greener, though.

I run windows on my Mac sometimes because I need to. It’s a really great convenience because I don’t have to worry about having a separate PC. It’s silly to assign some sort of value judgment to using one operating system over another- neither one is flawless, and it’s a matter of preference and utility. Being a designer, I like Macs because they out-perform PCs in that regard in my own personal experience. Nothing more or less then that was the reasoning behind my decision.

Most people who say otherwise suffer from fanboy syndrome.

Kind of outdated:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/136649–3/in_pictures_the_most_notable_notebooks_of_2007.html

Nevertheless, impressive. Mac’s are usually faster because they use relatively uncompromising parts, whereas most value PCs have at least one bottleneck somewhere.

GAMEZ