Living in both the Mac and PC world for some 20 years now, I still find
the Mac much easier to keep functioning. There are some limitations on
hardware, but not on the upper end (any networkable printer is very
likely to be Mac compatible, at least with a generic Postscript
driver). PCs, on the other hand, require HUGE effort to get compatible
drivers, SCSI was always a big pain, and so forth. Macs are somewhat
more tempermental in some ways (i.e. no slave drive on revision 1 B&W
G3s) and memory isn't always "standard", but I've always had fewer
headaches with them. A couple of driver packages has always taken care
of the hardware (mostly hard drive) problems. I did find one of the
few drives completely unusable with my Wallstreet G3 laptop quite by
chance, but all in all, I've spent much less time making my Macs work
than my PCs/
Certainly, the OS is much less troublesome. Up to OS X, installation
and re-installation was a breeze. OS X takes somewhat longer (as a
friend of mine says, Linux/Unix is patch heaven....), but is still less
of a hassle than XP or any earlier version. Managing extensions is
very easy on the mac, unlike a PC pre-XP/2000, and memory management is
a whole different ball of wax, although that issue is thankfully gone
-- anyone else remember when 512k of memory was a lot?
As far as users screwing things up, what can they possibly be doing
other than actual damage? Using any standard software is pretty much
transparent, and Macs no more sensitive to damage from inappropriate
"hot swapping" things than PCs.
Peter
