Fun in PC land, or why Macs are faster
I got a pretty standard assignment today: a faculty member’s computer is on the fritz, so take a look and replace the machine if you can’t fix it on-site. Fair enough; I went down and took the requisite look. She had a Dell Optiplex something something 26-something, and on the dim screen was a blinking DOS command prompt. I tried typing on the keyboard, but no input was entered. Restarting did nothing, nor did fiddling with the BIOS settings. Eventually, I just grabbed the machine and replaced it with another one while Jesus took a look himself.
By the time I returned to the office, Jesus was happily tapping away at the now-operational Dell. I had figured that I had overlooked something silly, so I asked him what it was he did to fix it. Grinning, he held up a jet-black floppy disk and said, “Here’s the criminal. It was in the floppy drive.”
I was a bit bemused. “What’s so bad about a floppy in the floppy drive?” I asked naively. This was Windows we were talking about, after all.
“In the BIOS, it was set to boot off the floppy drive before the hard drive,” Jesus replied.
“But… is there an operating system on the floppy?”
“No…”
“Soo… why would it get stuck on the floppy if there’s no operating system to boot from, then?” I retorted, fully aware that attempting to make Windows conform to logic was an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, I had to try; my inner Techno-Paladin demanded it.
“Well,” Jesus said, “Sometimes it’ll get stuck on the floppy drive if it’s unformatted or something.”
“But in that case, wouldn’t this have been a routine occurrence back in the days of floppies when everybody used them for everything? I don’t recall an epidemic of stuck machines trying to boot off operating system-less floppies.”
“It could have been the floppy drive or there might be corrupt data on the disk,” Jesus replied, invoking the classic Windows user’s voodoo explanation for a problem with no obvious cause.
“Let’s see what’s on it, then,” I suggested. We popped into the now-functioning computer, and it showed without complaint, displaying two normal-looking Word documents. So much for the data corruption or bad drive theories.
Sighing, I returned to the faculty member’s office and replaced the replacement computer with the original.
This brings me to my next point: the whole song-and-dance took a little under three hours–three hours that I could have spent doing other work I was assigned. The uselessness of this particular random Windows-related problem wasted 180 minutes of my life. I can accomplish a lot in 180 minutes. Or, I can use that same amount of time to goof off or read the news. Windows prevented me from doing these things with its random problem. In short, it wasted my time. Wasting time is not something that a fast machine typically does.
So why then do PC users constantly claim that PCs are faster than Macs? All the evidence I’ve collected while working with them for 8 hours a day suggests that PCs wear out and get bogged down faster then Macs left in the same condition, and experience more idiotic time-wasting snags by far.
The truth is that when your average PC enthusiast says, “PCs are faster than Macs,” he really means, “I can build a PC from parts I bought on the cheap from Newegg and wind up with substantially faster hardware for less than you paid for your Mac.”
And this is true. But it also falls into the classic PC user pitfall: that of thinking too much about hardware and not enough about software. Once this tricked-out gaming rig is assembled, it’s time for some software. Windows is a must for gaming, but who wants to pay for it? Most PC enthusiasts steal Windows, and the cracking process often results in background daemons that block Windows’ built-in anti-piracy tools from working. That’s a performance hit.
Then come the drivers for all that fancy custom hardware. Windows drivers are typically encrusted with trial software, unnecessary system tray utilities, and replacements for existing components of Windows (I’m looking at you, video and WLAN drivers) that work fine. After installing all this stuff without manually cleaning out all the junkware that hitched a ride, performance is lowered significantly.
Then comes anti-virus and anti-spyware. Generally, the more you pay, the crappier it’ll be and the more resources it’ll take up, but all anti-malware software that runs in the background takes up valuable system resources. That’s another performance hit right there.
Next, it’s time to download all the other utilities and miscellaneous pieces of software that make Windows more functional. First comes Winrar, which integrates into the Windows shell with a standard install, stealing valuable system resources. After that is Acrobat reader, which is so bloated it’s not even funny. Acrobat slaughters idle processor time, so there’s another performance hit for you. Needing to play pirated games that come in ISO and .bin/cue files, these PC power users typically grab Daemon Tools to mount those disk images as virtual CDs. This, as usual, bogs down the system.
Firefox comes at some point, but because of the design of Windows and its Registry, each application installed slows down the system a teensy-weensy bit. The Registry is just a big database; as it grows in size, it takes longer for anything to access a given piece of data, since the whole registry is just one big file. Were it logically split into many small files–say, one per application like Mac OS X’s preferences system, then having more preferences would result in no slowdown whatsoever, since any random preference file that needed to be accessed would be the same size as it was last time. Basically, the more Windows is used, and the more stuff you install, the slower it gets. Big time. Ask any Windows user how fast their Windows is after a year or two; most reinstall it from scratch every 18 to 24 months just to keep the whole thing from collapsing from the weight of its own bloat. And before Vista, reinstalling the OS erases all the user data! Faster, indeed.
This isn’t even including the truly random problems that plague windows as a result of its system administrator-centric design, terrible security model, poor privilege separation, and necessity to run on arbitrary hardware. Windows just falls down and dies regularly–I see it every day. In the long term, Windows is just fucking slow, and that’s a fact of life.
That leaves games. Yeah, Windows plays lots and lots of them, and Mac OS X doesn’t. That’s true. And if you’re a hardcore gamer, you ignore the problems and game away. That leaves your computer as a big fancy game console. Hmm. What about the times when you need to use it as something else? Good luck!
So yeah, your processor is faster than mine. But yours is churning away on protecting you from viruses and spyware that your operating system is too stupid not to automatically install and coughing and wheezing to access the humongous Registry every five seconds, while mine is keeping my system snappy when I have 13 windows and 8 applications open (as it is at the moment).
Remind me again how PCs are faster?
Categorised as: Mac OS X, Windows
The entire first half of this post is decidely disingenuous. You continually refer to Windows:
“This was Windows we were talking about, after all”
“attempting to make Windows conform to logic was an exercise in futility”
“invoking the classic Windows user’s voodoo explanation for a problem with no obvious cause”
“this particular random Windows-related problem”
…And yet you freely admit that the problem was that the BIOS was set to boot off the floppy before the hard drive, which it couldn’t, because there wasn’t an operating system on the floppy. At no point was Windows involved at all, because the BIOS wasn’t trying to load an OS off the hard drive. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if the machine had a hacked copy of OS X on it rather than Windows.
You’re no computer newbie, you know the difference between the BIOS (/EFI) and the operating system; I think you’re perfectly aware of this. Why did you affect the pretense of not doing so? If you’re point is that Windows has problems, I’m sure you can find enough genuine problems that you don’t have to make up ones that have nothing to do with Windows.
BTW, the answer to “But in that case, wouldn’t this have been a routine occurrence back in the days of floppies when everybody used them for everything?” is yes. When booting off floppies was common, it was a regular occurence to get a “non-bootable disk or drive inserted” BIOS error if you’d left a floppy in the drive; in which case you just ejected the floppy and pressed any key. It’s less common now both because so few people use floppies and because BIOSes are now rarely set by default to boot off a floppy before a hard drive.
The rest of your post is riddled with several problems as well (e.g. explorer extensions such as those which Winrar uses don’t “steal valuable system resources” unless you count the negligible time it takes for the graphics card to draw the slight bigger right-click menu; the program isn’t run unless you actually use it). I do agree with you about the amount of crap that comes with a lot of drivers these days, though: I’ve come to usually just not install them; most of the time, they work just fine with Windows’ built-in drivers, and I imagine the same is true with Mac OS.
Sorry for the negative tone of this post; I’d just finished my rather long comment on your post about the registry above.
Simon,
Whoops, your comments wound up in my spam queue! Sorry for the obscene delay.
What’s exceptionally clear to me is that you know probably more about Windows than I ever will, and you assume that my mistakes are malicious attempts to mislead rather than inexperience. This is not the case; I assure you, my ignorance regarding Windows is far greater than my knowledge.
You’re right that I know the difference between a BIOS and an OS, and you’re also right that Windows had nothing to do with the workings of messed-up BIOS settings. I apologize for this mistake. What I should have been referring to instead is the PC ecosystem made of of 3rd party hardware+BIOS+Windows, as opposed to the Mac ecosystem in which everything comes from Apple. It’s my view that this pieced-together system, while it has its advantages (hardware freedom, wide variety of choice), caused the problem due the inherent incompatibilities in components that weren’t necessarily designed to be used in tandem.
For the floppy problem, the user in fact told me that she often booted the computer with a floppy in it with no issue, so I was assuming that the BIOS couldn’t change itself. Thus, I blamed Windows. Truth is, I was guessing. I had no idea what the precise problem was. My basic point was that a non-integrated system is prone to such seemingly random issues. I chose Windows as my whipping boy because it was easy, and I was mad. I didn’t know, and so I shouldn’t have assumed. I apologize.
Also, I was completely unaware of how often bad boot order-related problems were in the floppy era. I was basically talking out of my ass, and you were right to correct me. Thanks.
Same goes for WinRAR in the shell. I didn’t actually know that it wasn’t running at all times. But what about Daemon Tools? I’m a little more sure that I was right about that one, at least, since how could it be on-demand if it wasn’t constantly running?
See, I think the general problem here is that you seem to think I’m much more knowledgeable than I actually am. No problem on the negative tone; I apologize about the ranty post. Truth is, this post was borne out of a mad rage, and was therefore a good deal less reasonable and informed than it should have been, and for that I apologize.