Thanks, Darwin.


Boot-time is now 2 minutes,  (more and more programs! How does this happen?). Not fast.

I have 335 programs installed under XP (as reported by Your Uninstaller! 2008 with screensavers and windows updates excluded from the list) and my boot time is about 2 minutes. What I've done is leave the XP machine as my "play with software" environment and (try to) keep the Vista notebook as a work machine with about 140 programs installed. It boots in under a minute, though I've not actually timed it. I'm pretty careful about loading anything under Vista - I don't want to slow it down! So I test any applications under XP first. Doesn't help too much if there are different installers for Vista and XP, but it's served me well so far... Of course, I have the luxury of doing this because all of my computers are notebooks, so I can run two or more of them simulataneoulsy (I use Synergy to use a common keyboard and mouse - kind of cool to zip between OS X, XP, Win2K and Vista  ).

Curt: you didn't actually run 700+ programs at the same time, do you? Only the running apps sucks up ram

Other than that, I was impressed with the speed, 15 yrs ago; how is OS X comparing to Vista, regarding boot time and loading-of-apps time?

On my hackintosh Dell workstation (2GB)[1], OS X Leopard (with more programs installed) used to load approximately 2.5X faster than Vista (after grub had done its thing). It shut down approx 2x faster too. On my macbook, OS X is again >2x faster than XP at startup. Also, one of the brilliant things about OS X is it doesn't seem to get slower the more software you add. I remember spending so much time keeping XP optimised (as many here do too), and my macbook XP is really spartan (it just really runs Matlab as its core duty, I guard against installing too much stuff otherwise), but my Leopard install is filled with trying just about every piece of software under the sun; yet Leopard never slows down over time (except when using iStat Menu which slows startup down enough I don't run it on my laptop).


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[1]Interestingly, the hackintosh loaded Leopard faster (~40secs) than my current monster Mac Pro (~50secs)...

Wn2k Sp-4 on my 8 year old PIIIE 600Mhz notebook with 512MB RAM loads in 2 minutes 42 seconds (I timed loading to the desktop until the cursor reverts to the arrow, as opposed to the hourglass). Once loaded, there are 51 processes running. I have 176 applications installed. NB you can shave, perhaps, 10 to 15 seconds off that time because I blew entering my password not once, but three times - forgot that I had changed it yesterday  I should do it again to see what difference it made, but this is close enough. Note, too, that all of my windows machines require ctrl-alt-del logins at boot but I have the Mac set to log directly into my user account without a password required - haven't gotten around to setting that up. Even so, the 59 seconds is impressive!

Now, the issue of functionality is a whole different one... the Win2k machine (which has the same 8MB Video card as the iBook) RIPS through Office 2003. The iBook is much slower running Office 2008 (which isn't a fair comparison, I know), but then, even users running brand new Macs with loads of RAM, dual-core Intel processors complain about Office 2008 being a pig to load.

@nontroppo - what method/recipe did you follow to get your Hackintosh up and running? I'd be curious to try Tiger on one or more of my machines.

Interesting, nontroppo, thanks! I have a full Tiger DVD (though I had to *cough, cough* "work around" the DVD challenged nature of my iBook) so thought I'd install that. I'll take a look at the Insanely Mac forums  

Think I'll start a new thread as that is off-topic enough to derail a bullet train 

^ Hah! well done all round Curt