You tend to find that Macbook Pros have better graphic chips than PCs with similar specifications.

Um. Not true. You can buy a laptop - even a humble Dell for example - with better graphics than any MacBook for less money.

The only good things macs have going for them are their unix roots and the amount of half-decent software available for them. The rest of it is like a prison, from the OS to the hardware, you get what jobsy tells you to have and pay a great deal for it.

You are looking at this from a bizarre perspective. If your software is blue screening Windows 7 on a bare metal PC then it will still blue screen Windows 7 in VmWare/Parallels/VirtualBox!

Windows 7 is in my experience very reliable indeed and I'd struggle to say whether it or OS X is better here. I can do things with drivers and software and hardware that are supposed to be possible in Windows 7 that I know from experience will be guaranteed to cause a blue screen every time so I have found work arounds that usually involve stopping Windows Update from installing newer drivers! I can't find anything that will cause OS X to suffer the equivalent (AKA a kernel panic) on a real Mac in the same predictable way. This is certainly down to there being fewer possible hardware/driver/software permutations in OSX than it being inherently more stable.

You may want to go back any analyse what you have from the ground up. If you did a simple upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 then you might want to do a complete back up then reinstall everything from scratch. in whatever is the most basic way that your system allows you (beware of erasing any recovery partition!) I know this is boring and time consuming, but you may well find it resolves your problems. You may also want to check that there isn't some issue with your hardware. It may seem that it was changing from Vista that caused the problem, but that may only be a symptom. I had a machine here that ran XP perfectly for years, but Vista wouldn't even install on it without a blue screen. I could reinstall XP and no problem! It turned out that I had a flaky stick of RAM.

Edited by Desmond (Fri 24-Jun-11 22:00:57)

Sorry to argue, but I have found that the latest drivers were often the cause of my problems with Win 7 (and OS X for that matter). I have a real world right here right now example in Win 7. I have an ATI graphics card on my HTPC. The drivers from April work fine. The drivers from May cause BBC and ITV and a lot of other HD content to pixelate (this is by now a well documented issue). I've not bothered with trying the June drivers since I know from experience ATI can be appallingly slow to address such issues and rarely say in their release notes whether they have or have not addressed them. I don't plan on doing any updates to my HTPC's ATI drivers until I know from user reports that the problem has been resolved.

The best rule to always follow is if it ain't broke and no one has given a compelling reason to change things then don't try and fix it. Particularly, don't update drivers even if WIndows or something keeps nagging you to do so unless you have problems with the ones you have installed. Moreover, don't trust WIndows' restore feature to put you back where you were and don't delete old driver downloads you may have since some companies seem intent on forcing you to download their new software only, which is a big problem when it causes your machine to blue screen on boot as soon as it is installed.

The best rule to always follow is if it ain't broke and no one has given a compelling reason to change things

A good rule in general. But in this case it is broke, so testing with updated drivers is a logical trouble-shooting step. Trouble-shooting computer problems is not rocket science, just a matter of methodical testing.

LOL. The next OSX upgrade is going to cost £25-29. How much is Windows?

Windows requires activation and all sorts of anti-piracy checks. OSX has none of that.

If i want to I can install Windows or Linux on the Mac, how is that being "locked down"?

Windows 7 cost me £45; that was for a full version rather than an upgrade, and I got physical media for both 32- and 64-bit versions. I'm not sure that's a huge difference in cost.

My laptop cost me £275, my desktop £350. What do the cheapest Apple computers cost?

Locking down is more applicable to software under OS X; Apple is increasingly locking down the supply chain. You are right that Windows 7 or Linux will run on Apple hardware, but what's the point of paying so much more to run the same software? Macs only make sense if you run OS X on them; otherwise a commodity PC is much better value.

In reply to a post by acpsd775:

I think im the only person to brake the saying i had a mac for 2 month and couldn't wait to move back lol i found my self using windows 7 on boot camp 90% of the time

You're not the only one, I really tried to like OSX, but after over a year of use I'm back to W7 at work.

Can't really put my finger on why, was fine for email and browsing, but almost everything else felt awkward for some reason, I absolutely hated finder and the way windows worked (resizing etc), felt like I wasn't in control.

As for the OP, I know it doesn't help, but I too have never had a crash or any problem with W7. I actually had more program glitches and crashes in OSX.

In reply to a post by SamsonUK:

In reply to a post by acpsd775:

I think im the only person to brake the saying i had a mac for 2 month and couldn't wait to move back lol i found my self using windows 7 on boot camp 90% of the time

You're not the only one, I really tried to like OSX, but after over a year of use I'm back to W7 at work.

Can't really put my finger on why, was fine for email and browsing, but almost everything else felt awkward for some reason, I absolutely hated finder and the way windows worked (resizing etc), felt like I wasn't in control.

As for the OP, I know it doesn't help, but I too have never had a crash or any problem with W7. I actually had more program glitches and crashes in OSX.

That's basically my experience too hated that when you pressed maximise it just slightly resized and not full screened lol and just a lot of other little niggles.

and just to say before any one calls me a windows fan boy im not i dual boot my desktop with windows 7 ubuntu 11.04 and backtrack 4 and my netbook with windows xp and ubuntu 10.10 i dont have.

I just never felt osx worked very well for my needs and seams an expensive way to use windows so sold a friend it.

Ash

Edited by acpsd775 (Sat 25-Jun-11 12:20:51)

You can get Windows 7 cheap yes, but that'll be some OEM copy or similar.

Full retail box is over £100:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/microsoft-windows-7-ho...

As for the Mac hardware, so what? I actually sold and replaced about two or three machines with one when I bought my Mac pro years ago. Simply because Windows totally sucked at running music software unless I customised the OS to the point of being unusable for a daily OS.

I ran a Linux machine for the Internet as the above music PC was bare bones and I didn't want to screw up my work with a virus.

If you've ever tried to compose music with Windows you'll know how much a killer of creativity it is. Which is probably why Macs are so popular in the music industry. I saw Erasure live last night, guess what Vince Clarke was using? A Macbook Pro of course. The guy is a legend in the electronic music world and he wouldn't be using something that didn't work well (he famously stopped using MIDI as he claimed it wasn't as good as CV).

I now have a Macbook Pro, Mac Pro and Mac Mini. I have few or zero technical issues and so I don't have to spend hours fixing things, which when you have a mother with a serious illness is a god send.