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Monday, May 2, 2011

Com­puter Buy­ing Tips







Decid­ing whether to buy a Mac or a PC should be based on two main points: your bud­get and whether the com­puter is pri­mar­ily for busi­ness or plea­sure. Both types of com­put­ers are excel­lent for spe­cific tasks, although if you are plan­ning to go to work and bring your com­puter with you, you may need to con­sider what types of com­put­ers your cowork­ers will have to make it eas­ier to swap files or com­pare notes. Here a few basic tips on how to choose the right com­puter for you.
Bud­get
There’s no debate—Macs are far more expen­sive than PCs. If money is a big issue for you, you’ll want to buy a PC. How­ever, Macs aren’t over­priced. Unlike PCs, each com­puter is designed for max­i­mum effi­ciency in both pro­cess­ing speed and ease of use. While PCs fre­quently crash and are vul­ner­a­ble to spy­ware and viruses, Macs resist most viral attacks and oper­ate at a con­sis­tently high stan­dard with vir­tu­ally no tech­ni­cal issues. If you can afford it, a Mac is an excel­lent invest­ment which will work for you for years.


Busi­ness
While Macs have always been the pre­ferred com­puter of graphic design­ers and other cre­ative indi­vid­u­als, for most cor­po­rate office work, PCs have long been favored over Macs. For this rea­son, PCs still dom­i­nate in most busi­ness settings.
Up until a few years ago, the major soft­ware designed for busi­ness suites, like the Microsoft Suite, was designed chiefly for PCs. How­ever, the pop­u­lar­ity of other Apple prod­ucts such as the iPod and iPad has started to change the way Macs are per­ceived in the larger cor­po­rate world. Most busi­ness soft­ware now has ver­sions avail­able for both Macs and PCs. Because of their heftier price tag, Macs still have a long way to go in mak­ing a dent in the cor­po­rate world, although in terms of func­tion­al­ity they per­form just as well as a PC.
Graph­i­cally, Macs have richer dis­plays and a Linux based oper­at­ing sys­tem that makes them ideal for manip­u­lat­ing com­plex infor­ma­tion such as lay­ered graph­i­cal dis­plays. Pho­to­shop was ini­tially designed for the Mac. If you are buy­ing a com­puter for use in a pro­fes­sion­ally cre­ative set­ting, your cowork­ers will likely also be using Macs.
Pro­gram­ming
Com­puter pro­gram­mers are evenly split on whether Macs or PCs make bet­ter pro­gram­ming tools. The truth is, it comes down to a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence. Macs devel­oped a com­pre­hen­sive suite of devel­oper tools with their OS 10 which, if used prop­erly, can help you get to the moon. PCs have always been ori­ented toward pro­gram­ming; in fact, the DOS/Windows inter­face was devel­oped mainly as a way to stay com­pet­i­tive with the user friendly Mac inter­face. How­ever, many pro­gram­mers have com­plained that Macs are slower than PCs when it comes down to exe­cut­ing large amounts of freshly pro­grammed code.
Per­sonal Use
If you enjoy play­ing video games in your spare time, buy­ing a PC is prob­a­bly the best choice. This is partly because PCs are eas­ier to hook up to aux­il­iary equip­ment like tele­vi­sion sets or other devices. Although USB ports are evenly dis­trib­uted between Macs and PC, the higher data trans­fer por­tals of a Mac do not always adapt eas­ily to most con­ven­tional tele­vi­sions, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to quickly relay infor­ma­tion between the two devices, whereas the higher data trans­fer por­tals of a PC are usu­ally very adapt­able to aux­il­iary devices.
If, on the other hand, you pre­fer to design or develop cre­ative projects in your per­sonal time, Macs are a much bet­ter choice. Because Apple has invested so much time in mak­ing the user inter­face incred­i­bly easy to use, spend­ing time cre­at­ing music or draw­ing or edit­ing movies becomes less about the com­puter and more about the activ­ity; you for­get you are using a com­puter, and can instead focus on the act of cre­ation. PCs have a more rigid approach; it’s hard to for­get that you’re on a computer.
Cloud Com­put­ing and the Future of Virtualization
Of course, with the tech com­mu­nity excited about the poten­tial of cloud com­put­ing, com­puter mem­ory is going to become less of an issue, with flex­i­bil­ity, mobil­ity, and pro­cess­ing speed becom­ing increas­ingly impor­tant when mak­ing pur­chas­ing deci­sions. Mac’s suite of mobile devices are far bet­ter adapted to shift­ing between dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal areas while also offer­ing enough func­tion­al­ity to make them viable busi­ness tools. How­ever, for now you should buy the com­puter that best suits your needs, and plan on the inevitable: no mat­ter what you buy now, in a few years it will be com­pletely out­dated anyway!

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