34 Responses to “Confessions of a Mac User”

1. Pingback: Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 9:38 am

   1 AppleGeeks 3.0 […] Jamie at AngryZenMaster switches to a PC …kinda. He’s a very good friend of mine, so I’m not going to kick his ass. […]

2. Kiey Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 am

   2 Ironically (I guess more coincidentally) I’m looking to upgrade my current PC. I’m actually thinking of just buying a pre-built system but haven’t decided yet exactly I’m going to do. You should really get Steam and download/buy the Orange Box if you haven’t already. That’ll put the machine to good use.

3. Jami Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 am

   3 Author Comment I’m downloading the 360 demo for the Orange Box now. Heard too much about Portal and I’m tired of not getting any of the jokes.

4. BAMikeyD Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 am

   4 Yeah I usually advise against the slim line cases for heavy work. This is because of how close everything is in the case, and PCs tend to be… HOT. So I usually go for the BIGGEST case I can find in order to avoid this complication. However, the slim case you have seems to have enough vents in all the right places to correct this problem and still be a slim bodied beauty. I’ve never bought a slim line optical drive though, but it looks pretty cool. Also, I have personally ran into A TON of trouble with the Seagate drives. Every single one I’ve ever owned has died or turned into what I like to call a “mud runner” (where it slows down to the point of some one running through mud) after about 6 months or so. I would recommend at this point, buying an external HDD to back everything up on, and if you encounter any problems with the Seagate drive, for your next drive, go with Western Digital. Granted I haven’t even TOUCHED a Seagate since like 1998 so they may have improved… but who knows. Good luck!

5. Laura_Dee Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:39 am

   5 Have fun with the Nvidia 8800 GTS PCI-E graphics card, Jamie. I have exactly the same card that you have and they are absolutely awesome! ^_^ Just be really careful with that case and internal though, because the 8800 GTS series of cards can pump out some fairly decent tempratures if the airflow through the case isn’t kept at a high level. Other than your choice of DDR2-RAM (I’m a Corsair Girl through and through), you’ve got yourself one handy little machine.

6. Squirrel Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 12:26 pm

   6 Agreed about the art software, it’s sad that those companies aren’t supporting macs very well anymore. On Seagate HDs, both of my older brothers, computer and electrical engineers, have had good experiences with Seagate drives, but if BAMikeyD’s prediction becomes true WesternDigital HDs are excellent. On that note, I’m sure you know this, backup them files! Interestingly enough, you can now (with Tiger) install os X on a home built machine. I understand you could do that before IF you could do some pretty advanced meddling with the system, but now you don’t need to. Watch out for overheating!

7. Tyler Anderson Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 1:14 pm

   7 so uh…i’m just as clueless about harware stuff as you are…uh…is the Jean Claude Van Damme the official closing credits? Its like a trainwreck, i want to look away but cannot. it haunts me…

8. Cortharis Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm

   8 Nice work. I loved how the 4 hour transition turned into you sounding tired and exhausted. I’ve built / tinkered with many a PC in my day, and I can tell you, the power switch is pretty good. Still, excellent work for a first timer. Hope you’re happy with the machine. It’s a full on number cruncher, not really an intense gaming machine, but it will do you well. Aside from the drive capacity, the Seagate was a good choice (still have never had a problem with their drives). Personally, since you’re doing more 3d graphics with the little tyke, I would have put in double the ram you have in there. If anything I would say tweak your swap cash too if you’re going to bigger graphics projects. All and all, have fun with the new system. There’s lots of help around if you want to tweak your machine and settings.

9. Blishfire Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 7:31 pm

   9 “Fuck Vista” - haha. true dat brother.

10. Kyle Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 8:28 pm

    10 My opinion for your next “upgrade” or whatever in the future…go with AMD processor. They’re so much more powerful and stable than intel for the same price, sometimes even cheaper. The motherboard and video card I like though. I usually prefer ATI for video, but I have to admit to running an NVidia card because of cost and ease. The HD i’m gonna have to agree with BAM and say get a Western Digital when you get a chance. Other than that it sounds sweet. An extra fan won’t hurt to keep everything nice and cozy. I read a research showing that a buttload of fans does better than a lot of the other cooling systems like water and such, it’s just that they’re noisy and make everything else hot. You could always get extreme and use that gel stuff though. So yeah. I use both a mac and PC btw. I started on PC but got used to mac at school. Now I have both and am looking to add a linux box.

11. Kai Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 8:49 pm

    11 welcome to the dark side brother i once threw my computer out the window then my friend lent me his old mac till i upgraded with all my new pc glory ( worship xp) now that i think about it i dont have a window where the hell did i throw it??????

12. salthegeek Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm

    12 well that was funny . I am preparing to building a gaming pc any suggestions ? Im thinking of getting the skulltrail board and a core 2 duo processor

13. Zach Posted: Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    13 re: Kyle Actually, for the last 2-3 years, Intel’s processors have outperformed AMD’s in nearly every benchmark category. Check tomshardware.com - the lowest-end Intel Quad Core processor outperforms the highest-end AMD Phenom Quad Core processor. Same thing with Nvidia - variations of the 8800 GPU occupy the top 3 spots in benchmarks. I used to be a devoted AMD user, but because of the facts, my last 2 PC builds have been all Intel / Nvidia. sources: http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

14. xGAx Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 am

    14 Don’t say fuck vista if you haven’t had to use it for a little over a year. Now that I look back at W:XP, XP has a cr4p-load of stuff and complicated things compared to vista. The only bad thing is that when you get vista, you have to change around a lot of settings to make it quick and easy, but thats only about a 1 time job. (And I don’t say fuck mac, because I’ve never used it for a year before.)

15. Martin Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 4:11 am

    15 Hey Jamie, I am glad that you have accepted a PC into your fold. It just goes to show that a long time Mac user aren’t just limiting their choices to just the one platform, and that both platforms can be superior and inferior to one another at the same time.

16. SandwichBoy Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 6:09 am

    16 Ugh…jumpers. Absolutely despise those fiddly little fuckers with a passion. I recently had to reconfigure the guts of my old PC in a new case with a few new additions, and it took me forever to get them set up properly because the motherboard was too old to have one of those handy little slots that you slide all the jumpers into, and then just plug the whole thing into the board. Aside from the tension of mounting the CPU and heatsink (always feels like I’m gonna break something with the amount of pressure required) that is my least favourite part of assembling a rig. So yeah, do NOT feel bad for messing up one jumper, those things are just obnoxious. And yes, fuck vista.

17. RealUnimportant Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 6:50 am

    17 Silly question of course, but why didn’t you just use Boot Camp? It does everything I need from a PC, because it IS a PC… And with Parallels on top, I can even do most of it under OSX!

18. Kevin Bahrt Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 6:57 am

    18 Used both Vista and XP. Vista has some really nice features and organization systems and the search boxes are awesome but the general bugginess and slow speed aren’t worth it what with all the gui converters out there for free. If microsoft doesn’t release a vista service pack that makes vista a truely epic OS I plan to wipe my machine and put XP with a converter on it.

19. Kris Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 7:40 am

    19 Congrats on the upgrade. and i too have had powerswitch troubles. (i mixed up the reset switch and power switch, now THAT was fun to figure out) PS, RealUnimportant: http://www.applegeeks.com/lite/index.php?aglitecomic=2006-04-26

20. Jami Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 11:23 am

    20 Author Comment @RealUnimportant, Hawk asked me the same thing, but both of my Macs are old 800 something G4’s so boot camp isn’t an option for me. Wow man, look at all the PC love! Should have asked for help sooner! HAHA!

21. Wayne Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    21 Yeah, you’re not going to get into Boot Camp on PowerPC chips. I run Parallels on my MacBook Pro and am reasonably happy, but I definitely need to upgrade my laptop to 4gig of ram. Absolutely loved the “My name is Jean-Claude Van Damme” video! I saw him in the halls at San Diego ComicCon one year: he’s a short li’l squirt! The bodyguards surrounding him just dwarfed him. IMDB says he’s 5′10″, but no way.

22. Suki Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm

    22 Boot Camp…-faints- Can you guys just stick to one side lol btw ..yea.. fuck vista..lol aw man…omfg…..you got that graphic card? dude… lol PNY’s GX card is sexier and theres another graphic card out by Nevidia? i forgot that company…lol if can’t play crysis..it sucks..lol

23. Alex Posted: Feb 23rd, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    23 Just for the record, mirrored door g4’s are demon possessed. I work at an Apple authorized repair place on my schools campus, and I’ve heard some horror stories from some of the older techs there.

24. Ancients Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 1:22 am

    24 >BAMikeyD >I have personally ran into A TON of trouble with the Seagate drives. Interesting thing to note. These days quality control at seagate is among the best in the business. And theres that whole 4-5 Year (thats years not months) warranty that beats the crap out the little 2 year ones other people give you. P.S.: I have had 2 seagate drives ever fail. one was an external that i dropped over 8 times and only died after 7 years of punishment and the other was my dad managing to short on out in the computer i built for him… getting an RMA for that took a total of 15 seconds.

25. iFerret (Graham Simpson) Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 5:59 am

    25 xGAx, here’s a funny story for you. Win retail home premium. 4PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 6PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 8PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 10PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. Tuesday: 4PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 6PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 8PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 10PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. Wednesday: 4PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 6PM: Install on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. PM: Install Kubuntu on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 10PM: Install Leopard alongside Kubuntu on “Vista Capable” TabletPC. 11PM: Go to sleep with smile on face.

26. iFerret (Graham Simpson) Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 6:01 am

    26 And for the record, that was all with Windows Certified drivers provided by the Manufacturer, and the tabletPC is known good - note the Ubuntu and Leopard installs that worked fine. So, while the “At least a year” motto is GOOD - It doesn’t hold if you can’t install it in the first place. Most other OS’s install from a livecd - so you know how the OS is going to work before it wipes your HDD.

27. -Z- Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    27 Goddamn jumpers. Building PCs is fun though, even if it is a nightmare sometimes. And I use a MacBook.. haven’t built a PC in over a year. I’m going through a withdrawal. Good choices though, not a bad PC. Also, commendations for not getting that piece of shit Vista.. even with all of Leopard’s bugs, it’s still better than fucking Vista..

28. Daniel Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

    28 Truly tragic…a Mac user switches over to the dark side. There is no turning back. It’s kind of weird, though. It’s supposed to be the other way around with PC users switching to Macs. Couldn’t you have gotten help from a form, or Apple tech support before giving up?

29. Jami Posted: Feb 24th, 2008 at 11:23 pm

    29 Author Comment @daniel, if there’s a program that runs on Windows and has no OS X equivalent, no amount of Apple tech support is going to change that.

30. rescbr Posted: Feb 25th, 2008 at 2:18 am

    30 Well, you could go to the wine side. Ops! Wine still doesn’t work with OpenGL on Mac OS X’s X11. *sigh*

31. JustanApplegeeksreader Posted: Feb 25th, 2008 at 4:06 am

    31 There is a powerful 3D package that works on mac. It’s called Blender. It also work on Mac, PC, Linux. Build for Mac, PC, Linux are built almost the same day, so no platform is left behind. Homepage http://www.blender.org/ Some nice stuffs it can do for you http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/archive/november-2007/ And the developper are adding things that will rock softwares like Maya, Lightwave and Max out of their sock. Last but not least. It’s free. Not free like “pay a fucking dime after one week”. It’s free like “free forever bizatch!”.

32. sidewinded Posted: Feb 25th, 2008 at 5:02 am

    32 no freakin way. before you even said that it wasnt working i was like “he’s probably gonna forget to connect the case plugs” and then u said thats what happened and a L.LOL’d (literally laughed out loud) welcome to the dark side, we have fuckin’ huge cookie jars w/ cookies in them.

33. Echo Posted: Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:17 am

    33 Lol love the case btw, gonna look to see if they ship to Scotland!! I always like the look of macs but everything has a lil bigger price tag and the games i play arnt out for the mac, its a shame sometimes. I like ur choice of hardware. I would of agreed with some ppls comments about going with more ram but if ur using 32bit windows XP u cant get 4gigs really. U would have to install 64bit XP but the draw back is some 32bit applications run slower. And the comments that ppl to say to use vista, vista at this moment of time is crap, untill the next sp. Its a much more heavier os meaning ur hardware will have to work harder. And in a wee case like that u dont want anything to work to hard due to the size of the case, cause i bet that 8800 gts oc will procduce alot of heat when workin. And to finish up again excellent choice of hardware, love the case. And welcome to the world of PC …. hope u get out soon.

34. Uk_Mike Posted: Mar 2nd, 2008 at 6:55 am

    34 I hate you! Bloody Van Damme song will not go away. Everyone I shown it to seems to spontaniously burst into song! Its just so Damme catchy! Right now I’m training a group of tiny monkeys to come and sing it to you whilst you sleep!