Didja watch the latest Mac vs PC ads? You know the one with the legal talk and whatnot? Well, a few people have taken the time to transcribe the entire thing for your enjoyment. How nice. Ironicly, if you read through the text, the issues and recommondations are common to computers in general and not neccessarly specific to just Windows machines.
The second legal text displayed by PC:
To remove unneeded bloatware first open uninstaller, select applications to remove, and uninstall. To remove optional components, click start, go to all programs and open control panel, select remove components, select components you want to remove, select next, when done, select finish. Once initial prep is complete, PCs may then be easy to use under certain controlled conditions and when properly maintained. In order for PCs to achieve optimal performance on a regular basis and for long periods of time, routine maintenance should include (but is not limited to) the following: download and install updated anti-virus software, run anti-virus software, check for system updates, clean out registry, defragment hard drive, free up disk space, remove temporary Internet files, empty the recycle bin, remove unnecessary programs, run error check utility and fix file system errors.
Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to remove unnecessary programs and empty the recycle bin/trash can on both Windows and OS X systems. Just thinking.
1st:
Please note that when you first receive your PC there is some suggested work that needs to be done before PCs can perform at their peak. These steps include, but are not limited to, downloading and installing necessary drivers for peripherals. These drivers may include printers, scanners, cameras, storage devices, music players, and other media devices. There may be more depending on your needs. It is also recommended that first time users remove all unneeded bloatware and remove all operational components.
3rd:
It is recommended that a maintenance schedule is developed and adhered to in order to make sure your PC is running safe and secure. Update your software, do a virus scan, and run error check utility once a week. Search for and download software and driver updates, free up disk space, and defragment hard drive at least once a month. Empty the recycle bin and remove unnecessary programs once every three months. Back up all your files once a year. Please see instruction manual for more details. Failure to perform these functions may result in the following: freezing, viruses, slow performance, and/or error messages. If problems persist after routine maintenance is performed, please contact your local IT professional who may or may not refer you to your software or hardware manufacturer depending on where the problem originated. Important information about easy to use PCs: PCs may become more difficult to use if the following occurs: sluggish operating system, viruses, and error messages, crashing and freezing. Unfortunately, freezing and/or crashing are sometimes unavoidable. To avoid sluggish operating systems, crashing and freezing, it is recommended that you clean up your system registry, defragment your hard drive, free up your disk space, and perform other routine maintenance tasks. To clean out your system registry, first backup your data, back up your registry, purchase, download, and install Registry Repair program, then quit all programs, scan registry, determine safe registry items to repair/delete/remove, select ok, and repeat if necessary. To defragment your hard drive, click start, and go to all programs > accessories > system tools > and open disk defragmenter, then select C: drive, select defragment and wait. To free up disk space on your PC, click start, go to all programs > accessories > system tools > and open disk cleanup. Scan will automatically start. From scan results, select files to be removed, select ok. Restarting your PC may then be necessary upon completion of system registry clean up, hard drive defragmentation, and disk space clean out.
Final text, “PCs are now 100% trouble free.”
Please note: trying to remove registry items on your own is not recommended. It is often difficult to determine which items correspond to which applications, and by attempting to remove items yourself, you might accidentally remove a valid registry item, causing software crashes and errors. If a system registry becomes corrupt because you made a mistake when cleaning out the registry, follow these steps: back up data, back up registry, purchase, download, and install Registry Repair program, quit all programs, scan registry, determine safe registry items to repair/delete/remove, then select ok and repeat if necessary. Also, easy to use PCs can experience difficulty if malware, viruses, or spyware infect your PC’s system. There are 1.5 million signature-based malware detections with 20,000 new ones discovered everyday (based on 2008 reporting). Although some viruses are unavoidable, there are some preventative measures that you can take. When you first get your PC, configure your security settings (including things like Internet firewall, automatic updating, anti-virus, anti-spyware and other malware protection, other Internet security settings, and user account control). Eventually you may have to download and install security patches for your operating system and then as security updates become available download and install again. If your PC does get infected with malware talk to your IT professional first about the risks and benefits of treating the problem on your own. Do not try to remove a virus unless your IT professional has taught you and you understand everything. Ask them if you have any questions. Please see accompanying important information about virus protection on your hardware and software manufacturer’s website. Anyone can sit down and edit photos on their PC as long as their computer is running properly. Please note that proper maintenance, specifically disk defragmentation can take anywhere from minutes to hours to run depending on the size of your hard drive and how fragmented it is. Therefore, editing photos might be postponed if you chose to run maintenance on your computer prior to this act. Please note: your camera driver must be installed on your PC in order to review and edit your photos. Your camera will not work with your PC if the software/drivers are not downloaded first. Editing photos on a PC may be difficult for children under a certain age, or for people who are unfamiliar with how a PC works and how to download camera software and drivers. Also, no PC connected to the Internet is one hundred percent immune to viruses, spyware, adware, and other forms of malware. Once a year, PC users should back up a year’s worth of photos and files to a CD or DVD. Power PC users should start fresh and back up all their files and applications on an external hard drive, then use your original system installer disks to erase, rebuild, and reinstall your operating system from scratch. Therefore, if your PC is not one hundred percent trouble free at least you won’t lose all of your files. PC does not claim ownership of problems that occur from materials or software that you downloaded off the Internet. If your warranty has expired, and your PC is not one hundred percent trouble free, you are not eligible for a refund or replacement under the terms of the warranty. In addition, we cannot help you with software or hardware obtained without a warranty, such as software provided “as is “ or for free. Again, if problems continue, please contact your IT professional.
“Back up all your files once a year”
So if you own a mac you dont have to back up your data?? thats funny, cause i’ve replaced broken mac hard drives before. ONe of them was after 4 months of use. (you can’t blame microsoft for hardware components)
time machine comes with osx for free, and backs up everything automatically. I’m guessing that’s why they say it in the commercial.
And Shadow Copy comes with Windows for free, and has for many, many years. Your point? I know this is hard for Macheads to understand, but Apple did not invent backing up, nor OS-level software which backs up. In fact, OSX was pretty much the last commercial OS to include a built-in backup solution.
Really? For free with windows? For how long?
More importantly, *which* version of windows?
Windows XP home does not come with any backup utility. And, no backup utility that I’ve seen can backup the live registry files while you are logged in. While there is a workaround (i’ve seen backup programs that do backup the registry by doing the appropriate system calls), the basic issue is that windows lets you lock a file from being opened by another program, so there is always the risk that a backup program cannot access every file on your system.
Worse, there are files and registry settings that cannot be accessed by the logged in, administrative user. Do not say “That doesn’t exist”. I’ve had it happen. Easiest way I know is for windows checkdisk to find lost directories, put them in the recovery locations, and then you as a user go in there and try to clean things up.
Except that no one tells you that most files and directories just have “Inherit” permissions, and those checkdisk recovered directories can have “clean” permissions. Very quickly, you get subdirectories that you cannot access.
Now, you can boot into safe mode, and get full permission control, and fix this. But not if it’s on a USB drive — safe mode doesn’t load USB disk drivers, and with the USB disk drivers loaded in normal mode you cannot control or reset the permissions on these directories, resulting in the subdirectories and contents permanently lost.
Please don’t say I’m full of it. I speak from experience. XP Home stinks.
Now, there *IS* a shadow volume copy service, that lets you make some sort of copy-on-write functionality, as well as copies of “locked while open” files. And it is used by System Restore to make sure that every change is at least tracked for recovery.
But it’s not done in a way that is accessable to the end user. And it doesn’t checkpoint every file, nor does it let you look though the past history. Etc.
Time Machine is so superior to disk restore it isn’t funny. And all the features you want from such a thing do not exist in the shadow volume copy service, and are not present in any user-level backup tool that ships with XP home.
Now, what were you saying about windows having a time-machine like backup system for years?
Mac may have taken a while to bring out a backup system. And they may have done it by buying out someone else and improving what they had. But they have what is now one of the “best of breeds”.
Room for improvement? Certainly.
But please, tell me where a home user on either Microsoft Windows, Linux, or Solaris gets a fully functional automatic backup program that generates full backup sets by doing automated incrementals.
If you knew anything… you would know that there has been a backup program for backing up your hard disks for windows since the days of Win98, and yes, it came with the operating system. You can even download it off of the Microsoft website. The name of the most current version is called Imagex.exe and it has been on every computer I’ve owned for the last 10 years.
“PC does not claim ownership of problems that occur from materials or software that you downloaded off the Internet. If your warranty has expired, and your PC is not one hundred percent trouble free, you are not eligible for a refund or replacement under the terms of the warranty. In addition, we cannot help you with software or hardware obtained without a warranty, such as software provided “as is “ or for free. Again, if problems continue, please contact your IT professional.”
Not sure how the genius bar works being a PC guy, but does this mean even if you manage to get a virus, virus are under warranty with apple products?? If so thats pretty bad ass. If not wouldnt this be false advertising, or they just expected nobody to read this?
I back up my files, but I do it over our wireless network to a Time Machine drive. It just does it automatically. I set it up once and forget about it.
Also my MacBook Pro only came with software installed that I actually wanted and would use, not a bunch of demoware garbage like my old Sony VAIO laptop.
sony sucked for that stuff, that and their dumb partition of the hard drive.. what a pain, everybodys system drive would be full, and there secondary partition would be empty
Well boys and girls, that’s Sony’s fault, not Microsoft’s, isn’t it?
Well you can fix the blame (Sony vs Microsoft) or you can fix the problem (Buy a Mac.)
Where’s the fine print that explains how to identify “bloatware” for a first-time PC user?
All that legal copy, bashing PCs is 100 percent accurate. they suck in every way. GO APPLE!
What I find hilarious about this particular commercial, is that a similar amount of disclaimer is needed for pretty much every claim Apple makes, like “greenest family of notebooks” “world’s thinnest notebook” or any of their other blanket proclamations which aren’t even remotely true until you parse the byzantine conditions by which they limit the market to even begin to think the statement makes any sense.
Wow, well thought out… Just try to hang on Apple, your days are numbered as a niche player…
I guess all you Mac fans should just skip your patching. The Mac just does not need patching. Oh wait, what’s this?… an article on the Apple site that lists, WHAT!, 35 SECURITY patches for the OS and applications released in 2008 for the Mac.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
Apple is such a f*ing liar when they lead you believe that they are oh so perfect.
Just for the record my camera works on all of my computers without installing any software… How about some truth in advertising… Scared of bird flu… Go buy a Mac… It protects you from everything!!!
For AB,
You seem to be defending Microsoft a lot. You say that it’s the computer companies’ faults for these issues such as bloatware and not Microsoft.
Fair point, but you’re also missing the point in a very large way. You’re looking at this from a pure operating system point-of-view. Jon Hodgman’s character isn’t a personification of Microsoft; he’s a personification of a PC, the computers themselves in addition to the OS they use.
So, as I said, you have a fair point, but you are also missing the point. This is computer vs computer, not OS vs OS.
If you want to compare computer vs computer… put the best of Mac vs the best of PC for the same price range. Try comparing a $3000 alienware desktop to a $3000 Mac desktop, I’ll bet the alienware runs faster. Why? Because the alienware has twice the hardware the Mac does. As for looks… an alienware rig is “hardly” bulky and disgusting. Show me the Mac desktop with an overclocked quad core processor, 8GB of Ram, dual double core graphics cards, and a 1 TB hard drive. Oh, and it comes in a sexy sheen with a glowing keyboard.
A few things for the sake of controversy and outrage,
I just like that the disclaimer is just as disparaging of the PC as the PC itself, not like the excuse that any disclaimer Microsoft actually puts out reads as.
If the Microsoft zombies out there want to make excuses for Microsoft by blaming the equipment manufacturers that’s fine, but let’s compare products. EVERY piece of a Mac is put together by one company, when Microsoft is a piecemeal composite. Microsoft v Apple you have a personal computer and a pretty box with a disk or two in it (So no comparison there); that’s why the comparison is Mac v PC.
I’m waiting for the PC with Multiple Personality Disorder who can’t decide whether he’s a VAIO who tries to load device drivers as picture disks or a DELL that works for ten seconds then throws up hex codes.
I programmed on a PC for four years in college. And there’s just no comparison, nothing beats a commercial system that can compile open source software, pipe X windows, handle super user, and has an inexpensive protection plan that just works. Time Machine, The iLife stuff, that’s great, but there’s a reason that Mac power users don’t need an MSCE or any other certification, and it’s mostly that Macs just work out of the box.