Dumping Microsoft

[Blackhawk556]

Ah, not so much. For a while, the top end MacBook Pro was the fastest Vista machine on the market, even compared to Dell machines that cost as much or more when fully optioned with processor, RAM, HD, etcetera. Apple has ceded the mid and bottom end market to Dell, HP, Lenovo and company. If you compare a top end Dell to a top end Apple laptop, the prices are pretty close to one another. Apple is raking in so much money from the iPod, iPhone and iTunes that they're not hungry enough, yet, to tackle the mid and low end PC markets, along with the headaches they entail.

One other thing that really seperates Apple from the rest of the pack is their customer service. I know several people personally who have purchased used Apple laptops, and had boards fail on them, that Apple repaired for free, even though the warranty was expired. In some cases, the hardware was obsolete, so Apple replaced their machine with a newer factory refurb, along with a complimentary migration of their existing data and preferences from their old machine to their new one. I don't see Dell or HP going that extra mile to keep the customer happy, unless they pay beaucoup money for an extended service contract.

And now that they've upgraded their OS to a UNIX based platform (OSX is derived from BSD), it's pretty damn solid and secure out of the box. Yes, if you grew up on MS-DOS and Windows, you have to shift your paradigm a bit to get used to the logic of the Mac GUI, and you can call up a real, honest to ghawd UNIX command line anytime you feel like it.

And for purposes of disclosure, I have an HP (more like H-POS) laptop that's work issued, had a Mac Mini doing home theater duties (sold it), and a couple of Windows XP boxes. No Apple PCs in the stable at the moment.

I wouldn't say it's really secure

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=3474

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/security-snow-leopard/

[JDay]

Start, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs.

[Sinixstar]

About all I know of these puters is only not to shoot them.
The programs in question are,
windows liveonecare--always getting in the way
Microsoft works--- need to pay more to use it.
Microsoft office--- pay again.
Vaio help and registration.
Microsoft media player. Maybe keep this one?

not hooked to the web, so no updates needed or wanted.
Keeps changing how the screen looks,
gets in the way of what I want to do, etc.

Would have bought a apple...... But the price...

Live One Care can be disabled in the control panel I believe, or just flat out uninstalled.
Works - uninstall it.
office uninstall it
Vaio help and registration - honestly, you might want to leave that one. MFGs tend to load their computers with applications that tie in to the system (sketchy) and sometimes removing them causes unwanted consequences. This isn't an MS thing - it's a sony thing.
Media player - leave it. It does come in handy, and it gets used in the background more then you'd think - especially for streaming video on the web.

[locosway]

Openoffice.org is a good office suite and it reads Microsoft files.

[pingpong]

Step one: Start->Run->type in cmd->type in 'format c:'
Step two: Install Gentoo.
Step three: Cry for a few hours
Step four: Reinstall Gentoo
Step five: Develop of an alcohol problem
Step six: Cry some more
Step seven: Give up and install Ubuntu
Step eight: Wonder why you ever tried to install Gentoo in the first place