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Wed, Jan 3, 2007 14:50 EST
Update on John Halamka's OS Tests
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Posted by: Information Col... Blog: Information Collective
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The UK’s The Register reported yesterday that a computer looking much like John Halamka’s dream machine (a Dell laptop running OS X) sold on eBay in the UK last week for £378 (approximately $736.) Halamka, the CIO of CareGroup and Harvard Medical School, concluded after testing three different laptops (a MacBook, a Lenovo and a Dell) running three different operations systems (OS X, Fedora/RHEL and XP respectively) that his ideal configuration would be a lightweight Dell D420 subnotebook running OS X. (CIO reported on Halamka’s adventures in exploring alternatives to the Microsoft desktop in the December 1, 2006 issue.)
I asked Halamka via e-mail what he thought of the OS X equipped Inspiron that sold on eBay last week. He responded by saying that he thought it was “a great choice,” though he wished it were shipped and supported by Dell. “I continue to believe that OS X is a superior operating system, but I want to choose the hardware it runs on,” he wrote.
Problems he experienced with his MacBook over the holidays gave him more reason to be adamant about selecting hardware. He told me that his MacBook began randomly shutting down on him. “First it was once a day, then once an hour, then once every five minutes,” he wrote. The problem wasn’t caused by any particular software, he added. Whether he was using a word processing application, creating a presentation or using FireFox, he said he would hear a click and then his laptop would “shutdown completely, destroying all my work. I had to power it on to get it back up.”
He did some research and found that his MacBook’s wacky behavior was common. Fortunately, he also found a solution at techpaedia.com that involved writing a command in Terminal that that kickstarts the fans inside the hardware. “This illustrates my point that OS X is great, but the MacBook is problematic, overly hot hardware.”
He also mentioned that his Dell D420 subnotebook continues to operate flawlessly, “but Windows .DLL conflicts are a continuing source of frustration. One of the recent Windows security updates caused my wireless card to shutdown and I had to reload the Dell TrueMobile software to restore it.”
To read more about Halamka’s experience using a MacBook, a Lenovo running RHEL and Fedora and a Dell running XP, check out The Great OS Experiment.
--Meridith Levinson
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After using Windows since version 3.1 and Linux since version .93 I switched to a Mac for my home computer 3 years ago. I have nothing but good things to say about the Mac. I use Linux as my workstation OS at the office with Windows XP running in VMware. I find that this combination gives me the stability and Unix tools of Linux with the productivity software of Windows.
The Mac notebook gives me the best of both worlds. I can do just about anything that I can do in Linux and still have a decent interface. I run Windows in Parallels Desktop to use MS Office and a few proprietary programs. I'm considering changing my workstation at the offic to a Mac with Windows and Linux running in Parallels Desktop or VMware when the Mac version comes out.
I would like to point out with respect to the Dell running OSX that one of the reasons that OSX is easy to use and is free of driver problems is that Apple controls the hardware. Windows has driver problems because of the diversity of hardware it trys to support. This is even more of a problem with Linux which is always way behind Windows and OSX in driver support. On top of that many of the drivers for Linux don't support all the features of the hardware due to licensing issues.
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