stevienova.com

Yep, I have had similar experience. Used to make a living off of pc sales, but I said I was going to buy a mb pro and it's been great. I have not had to re-do anything since I bought it back in Jan of last year.

The longest time I've been with reformatting my pc was 5 years... Yes 3 years.. back then I my PS2/30 with DOS3.3

The good old days..

I went a year and a half with my last macbook pro without reformatting. I just got rid of it because I bought a new one. The last one could have kept going. I agree that Mac's for some reason don't get slower as time goes on like Windows does.

Anonymous - no, the stability doesn't speak to the nature of VMs. For my whole life, as long as I've been using Windows on the desktop, it's been as a physical machine, and I've had to rebuild it at least once a year. That's anecdotal evidence - it's just my one case - so your mileage may vary, and obviously it does. I think you'd agree, though, that as someone who doesn't even use virus protection, you're quite outside of the norm.

I think that speaks more to the nature of VM's than of the specific operating systems. You expect to be able to quickly and easily rebuild a VM, and I have re-done several windows VMs over the last couple years.

But my Vista Ultimate install -- which is my _main_ OS and the one that runs directly on the hardware of my system rather than in a virtual machine -- has been solid for nearly 15 months years now (last re-build was right after sp1 came out). I don't even run virus protection on it.

The odd thing is that I didn't expect this from it. Every one said Vista was so bad, and pre-sp1 it was a little shaky. But I found the trick is to put up with UAC for about the first month, while you're still tweaking the install and getting your apps set up right. During that 'burn-in' period UAC is very annoying, and you're working with a machine that doesn't yet conform to your expectations. But after then you don't see UAC prompts as much and you have everything set up how you like it. At this point, the experience for post-sp1 systems is pretty solid. You just have to put up with the first 4-6 weeks.

Don't tell me your mac didn't come with a similar learning and adjustment curve?

Don't get me wrong, I like Vista. I run it at work, I have been running it since beta, then RTM, and throughout, also running Windows 7 beta/RC1. Its just that Windows ends up getting "cruddy" after installing and doing tons of things, where the Mac doesn't seem to suffer from that problem. The Mac prompts me for my password when it has to make a major system change or a major install, which is good. Like you with Vista I don't run anti-virus, I usually turn off UAC as well, I was running into issues with SQL Server 2005 sometimes with UAC. I just dont see the full "package" from Microsoft as it is offered from Apple, I just don't. Upgrading from Tiger to Leopard was easy for me on my Mac, didn't even think of a full re-install. From XP to Vista? or Vista to 7? Sure you can upgrade, but even the pros don't recommend it. Full reinstall, over and over.

This was exactly why I bought my Macbook Pro too! I just got so burned out of the bitrot reinstalls. I have had to redo my OSX installation once due to my hard drive dying, but even that was an awesome process. Slip in the OSX DVD, run the install, and when it boots for the first time, it detects your Time Machine backups. Restored everything flawlessly as if it never happened. I'm so totally sold for life.