Mac vs PC

About a year ago I've decided to purchase the new iMac with Leopard - 24" screen, 4 GB RAM, 1TB HDD etc.
The reason why I've decided to do it was that I was a little bit tired with my fairly new PC - which I bought just 5 months before my Mac.

I've always been interested how Macs work and whether they are really so much better than PCs.

After a year I have a clear idea of what Mac is capable of - and can certainly say that Mac isn't much better than PC. In fact some of the options are simply very annoying.
And it's not because I've been using PC for many years and got used to it - I still think that Mac has many great features, but if you ask me whether my next computer will be Mac or PC - I couldn't give you a definite answer.

My PC uses - in my opinion - the best version of Windows, which is Windows XP Pro 64bit.
This system really does the job - and it's performance comparing to 32bits version - well - you can spot the difference right from the beginning. It's really fast and it crashes less.

We all know that Windows Vista was a huge misunderstanding - similar to Windows Millennium - and I'm sure guys from Microsoft know it as well.

Now - as to the Mac - the Leopard system is not as stable as they say it is.
My iMac is actually slower than my PC - which frustrates me as I hate waiting for the system to process my commands - and I'm sure everyone do.

Before I've purchased my new iMac, I saw all those promotional videos which introduce all these snazzy features like: Spaces, Time machine, New Mail etc.

Now - Spaces have an annoying bug, you go to one space where you have one application open, then you move to the other with another application open and when you switch between the two spaces and click on the application which is open in the active space the window suddenly slides to the other space.
As much as I was excited about this feature - now I'm not using it at all as it drives me mad.

Time machine does your backup every hour - and that's another thing which Apple guys didn't think about too extensively - it does the backup every hour and you cannot change it unless you install another - third party application called Time Machine Scheduler which you can get from here.
Doing backup every hour takes a lot of processing power from your processor and Ram memory - and trust me - you can really say that the time machine does the backup - even thou it's in the background.
So - even thou the great feature - perhaps could be done better.

New Mail - very nice indeed, but the problem is with the backup. You can retrieve all your folder structure under Inbox from Time Machine, but it will create a separate folder which you then have to pull all messages from and move to the other folder etc. - too much hassle.
Perhaps this was the reason why I've decided to install Thunderbird and started using it for a while until I've realised that even thou it has a very easy backup feature - simply copy the entire folder and restore by copying it back to the Library - it's actually very slow on the Mac - and the speed for me is a Must.

So I'm back with Mail - but not 100% sure about it - on PC there was no problems with Thunderbird - fast and easy to use - on Mac I have to use Mail - if there only was a simple solution to back up all your folder structure and emails within them when you need to reinstall the system than I could say that Mail is really very powerfull application - but until then my favourite will still be Thunderbird with easy backup and Add-ons feature.

Ok - additionally all these animated windows etc. - I'm not a big fan of them, and we all know that Windows Vista was trying to be the next OSX nice looking Operating System - and I think it nearly got there - except it's forgotten that it also have to do something apart from looking nice.

In Leopard you can easily turn off the animations of the dock and windows by using Secrets.
Nice and free application to tweak your OSX.

Another application worth to mention for Mac users is OnyX - which does the good job with maintenance.

Now, as to be stable - both - Leopard and Windows XP are the same.
Yes - both of them freeze the screen - I would even say in that respect Mac is even worse as on the Windows XP x64 it doesn't happen as often as on Leopard.

I had to reinstall my Leopard already twice - due to it's performance problems - on the PC I had to do it more or less every 4 months.

Also - if you're using Adobe suite - be aware that some of the great applications are not compatible with Mac - these include:

- Adobe Audition (PC only)
- Adobe Ultra (PC only)

and some versions for Mac have a lot of bugs - for instance Fireworks CS4 crashes all the time - I wasn't able to use it once since I bought the Master Collection about 6 months ago, Encore CS4 - some of the features are buggy - tint colour with images which exceed 1MB file size etc.

So - at the end of the day it's your choise, however due to the problem with the Operating System on PC (as I'm not going to buy any new system - my only choice would be Windows XP Pro x64 - and that's the only system for PC in my optionion which does decent job) I think I'm going to have to stick to Mac, but still having my PC as backup.

Let me know what's your opinion - I'd like to hear from you what you think about those two platforms.