This is NOT a which is better topic!

My friend today showed me his Mac laptop, which although having less specs than most PC's, i noticed that everything was running quicker. It loaded in a few seconds, and opening photoshop seemed to be alot quicker also.

I dont understand it really, as to look at the operating systemm it seems more complex and it has worse general specs than my PC, but it just seems alot quicker.

Anyone got any views or reasons why?

If it "seems" quicker, test it and see if it is actually true. It could be caching in the OS that is making it seem quicker.

I've heard others say similar things about snappier response from a Mac. When it became possible to run XP native on Macs a number of reviewers said the Mac seemed faster running XP than their PCs.

I don't have the answer but it has occured to me that new installs of an OS generally seem faster than older installs, in my experience, presumably due to less registry bloat. Just a thought.

And as Belvdr pointed out above you should make sure there is no caching going on. Check load times after startup, before any of those apps have been loaded into RAM.

Vista caches your commonly used apps by default, IIRC, does OS 10 do the same?

Some possible reasons...
He doesn't have 30 apps running in the background at startup.
He hasn't loaded 20 games, 49 gig of music, and surfed porn for 3 months.

northerdude probably hit the nail on the head. A brand new install of XP was fairly snappy even on my last machine. A K7 AMD Athlon 700MHz CPU w/ a whopping 128MB of RAM...

the reason it 'loaded' in a few seconds is that it was coming out of sleep mode, the mac equivalent of standby. Deceptive?

A year ago I was pining for a macbook and I actually ordered one. I returned it though before I had a chance to open it. I have some 'friends' with macs. I can NOT get used to the OS, I just prefer XP. The only real advantages that I see for going for a mac is the included software which apple touts so much. Looking back though, since then I have read some comparison reviews of photo and video apps that included the ilife suite.... it resulted in the ilife apps getting a very average rating.

All the ppl that I know who own macs are very happy with their computers. I guess they just never knew the joy of say upgrading a GPU, or modding their PC. After all, the whole reason that they got macs was to be different, who wants to open up their pristine iMacs and touch things? Individualism in Conformity?

Standbye eh? How does that work? I also dislike the way the mac worked, it was very confusing.

Can you not upgrade macs very easily? I noticed that for the money you pay twice the price for something thats half as good inside.

BUT saying that this computer running E6400 at 3.2ghz seems slower than his laptop! Maybe i need a new graphics card lol.

Right up until the moment you installed SP2.

I dont know exactly how the 'sleep feature' in macOSX works, all I know is that it uses juice and allows you to quickly resume what you were doing. Google it.... I don't dislike it, I don't knwo where you got that impression; I rather like it.

Macs are very overpriced and for the most part quite limited in upgrades. In your friends macbook for example, the CPU is soldered into the motherboard. Not very hacker-friendly. Also, how many mac owners have you met that built their own PC?

Be different... get a white rectangle like everyone else.

i know i have a dell... that was b4 i was 'enlightened'

I'm shocked.
Half the problem with macs and half the good of PC's is the ability to be flexable. The more flexable you make software the more that needs to be there to cover all that flexability. Macs use propriaty hardware and software that is always optimised because it pretty much knows what other hardware and software can also be there.
Anyway you get the idea, it might not be worded nice but it's all true
NOw i demand someone gives me a red star for this post, will be my first

bite my shiny metal a$$

Belinda pretty much hit the mac vs pc issue on the head with regards to performance differences. Every PC program needs be be designed to operate on multiple operating systems, different graphics cards and add-in boards as well as scaling to use different amounts of memory, processor threads and processor speeds. Where theres flexibility, theres inefficiency as the programs always need fallbacks for older or different hardware.

Macs are limited enough so that programs can be very heavily optimised, much like in consoles. If anyone succeeded in somehow changing something fundamental in a Mac like the processor or the memory controller, massive performance penalties will follow.

Other performance differences come from background programs eating into system resources.

Thats why Mac gaming is so much nicer and better than PC gaming. The titles are optimized for Steve himself, so that the elite-club of Mac owners can get only the best. Oh, and Macs NEVER have any bugs or fail EVER.

The only thing that I have ever seen fail on a mac is the cooling fan and our school has over 80 of them things. They also have a lab with about 40 HP pc's and 1 fails about every week and needs a new motherboard or something. I was really surprised by that and realized how lucky I am to have never had a bad PC part.

No, they are using Intel processors now and Windows XP can be loaded on them. In fact, many have (illegally) installed OS X on standard hardware. The OS is not proprietary; it is based on Darwin, a BSD port. The GUI, however, is proprietary, but the core OS is not.

At any rate, I've enjoyed both worlds for several years now. I don't enjoy messing with hardware any more; it just bores me to tears. That's one reason I keep a Mac around, and Dell for my PCs.

EDIT: I should also add that the programs may be compiled for a specific architecture (similar to i686 or i586 in Linux) but that's not going to give a huge performance benefit.

No, they are using Intel processors now and Windows XP can be loaded on them. In fact, many have (illegally) installed OS X on standard hardware. The OS is not proprietary; it is based on Darwin, a BSD port. The GUI, however, is proprietary, but the core OS is not.

At any rate, I've enjoyed both worlds for several years now. I don't enjoy messing with hardware any more; it just bores me to tears. That's one reason I keep a Mac around, and Dell for my PCs.

EDIT: I should also add that the programs may be compiled for a specific architecture (similar to i686 or i586 in Linux) but that's not going to give a huge performance benefit.

hardware ftw 8)