[geeks] Help me convert a computer illiterate to an iMac!

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Michael Schiller wrote:

> Yesterday she called me to tell me she bought a new computer, an
> $1800.00 Sony Vaio !!!!

Ouch.  $1.8k would buy a whole lotta Mac.  Hell, you can get a
refurbished Powerbook G4 for less than that!

> I told her to pack it up, and return it ASAP, and get an iMac. She
> says that she only understands Windows, and the Mac would confuse
> her, and she wouldn't be able to understand it.

She doesn't understand Windows.  She understands Windows 95, which is a
-very- different beast from Windows XP.  The UI is different, networking
is different, program maintenance is different, system maintenance is
different.  It's different all the way down to and through the kernel.

> She didn't say, but I'm sure the new machine has WinXP on it, which
> has to be quite a difference from Win95.

If it's new, it will have XP (probably home edition--which -sucks-[0])
on it, and XP is different enough from Windows 2000 to completely baffle
even a seasoned user.  Hell, even the Start menu is different--with
items adding themselves to and removing themselves from the main pane.

Oh, and, no, installing Win95 isn't an option.

> Can any of you give me some good reasons I can give her for returning
> the new Vaio and getting a 17" iMac instead? I've never used WinXP,

Well, XP is slow.  I ran it on a 1.1GHz Athlon for about a month before
I got sick and tired of the sluggish UI and the problems it has with a
4.1 analog speaker setup.  XP is confusing and ugly, and it'll make you
jump through hoops to do stuff that used to just require opening a
control panel.  A friend of mine (an avid PC-user) calls XP the "click
OS" because everything's about 80 million clicks away.  -He- won't even
put XP on his machines, and he won't run anything other than Windows.

> haven't used a PC that was faster than 400mhz (SunPCi), so I wonder if
> an 800mhz G4 would feel as fast as XP on  one of those newer PCs (I
> don't know the speed, but I would imagine it's close to 2ghz)

The G4 runs about clock-for-clock twice as fast as a Pentium 3 and about
2.5 times as fast as a Pentium 4, from what I've seen.  Nobody really
-needs- an 800MHz G4 for email and home finance--it's way overkill.  I
run OSX and do development on a 400MHz G3, and, yeah, it's a little
sluggish--but nothing like XP on a 1.1GHz Athlon.  This is comfortable,
but not blazing fast.

> As many of you know, I just got one of the 17" iMacs, and I love it,
> but I'm just not sure what argument I should use to convince my mother
> that she'd be better off with the iMac than the PC.

Give her an account on there and let her play with it.  The problem will
take care of itself, especially after she uses XP and finds out that she
-can't- go back to Win95 (or, in many cases, even 98) on a recent PC.


[0] I should qualify that.  Home edition is XP Pro sans multiprocessing
    and reasonably useful networking.  Gone are the days when you could
    right-click on a folder, click "Sharing..." and make some files
    visible on the network.  No, that was too confusing!  Now, to share
    files, you have to -move- -the- -folder- to C:\Documents and
    Settings\Shared Files\.  Granted OSX tries to get you to do the same
    thing, but at least there's a NetInfo workaround.  XP enforces it at
    the redirector layer.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke  *)  "everything i know about animals i learned from
Thorndale, TX      (*   ORA books."                  --alex j avriette