Reactivness…
I have a big Mhackintosh, Quad-core, 8GB RAM, 2×7200rpm hard-drives (1.5TB at this time), GeForce 8800, that is also running Windows Vista (mainly for Blu-Ray Ripping and re-encoding).
On the other hand my main Mac is my MacBookPro, that is 2X slower in any sense, Dual-core, 4GB RAM, 1×5400rpm laptop hard-drive, GeForce 8600M…
But when I compare this big PC on Vista and my laptop on Mac OS X Leopard, I get a feeling of powerness on my laptop, mainly by the benfit of Mac OS X reactivness. Just an example.
Yesterday I was copying 400GB between two external eSATA hard-drive on my laptop, while chating with FireFox and Safari, MSN with adium X, reviewing photos with Preview and then editing them with Lightroom 2 or CS 4. All that simultaneously, switching between my tasks using Expose.
At one time, after editing the last photo, I decided to switch off and remembered at the last second that my 400GB copy was running: I didn’t notice any performance degradation nor slowlyness, my laptop was just as reactive as usually…
Just before that, I was copying 3 encoded H.264 movies (12+GB) on my Quad-core PC, and then I decided to close the Explorer windows while the copy was running (slowly!). It tooks Vista between 3 and 4 second just to close each window, as if the computer was overloaded. The only task was to copy files, no Photoshop CS4, no Browser open, no MSN … and 2X to 3X the potential performance of my laptop!
The Mac OS X experience is something that anyone should try, at least one week, to discover how a modern computer could be efficient and reactive!