Check out the results! For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.
I dunno. The guy makes a point that for the kind of stuff that a lot of clerical workers do there really hasn't been any productivity increase. That's not that far off. After all 21 years is a long time in the computer biz and if you've gotta write a letter the fastest computer in the world really doesn't give you any kind of advantage.
Testimony to Apple programmers of old and especially to Microsoft. Without Microsoft, Intel and AMd would be small companies of little interest with modest R&D budgets from their puny profits.
I agree - most people today would include Web browsing as a significant activity and I doubt the ancient browsers that would work on the Mac Plus would be able to display pages properly. And to be fair, the guy should have used Wordpad on the PC vs. Word on the Mac since Wordpad can do most of the simple functions he tested. I just launched Wordpad on my QX6700 rig and it took about half a second to load, after I spent a minute finding the shortcut .
Without Microsoft, Intel and AMd would be small companies of little interest with modest R&D budgets from their puny profits.
Don't forget that MS also supported Apple with Mac versions of Office. If I remember correctly, Excel first came out for the Mac before the PC. MS did a lot to help legitimize the Mac for business use, although rabid Mac fans often ignore that...
I agree - most people today would include Web browsing as a significant activity and I doubt the ancient browsers that would work on the Mac Plus would be able to display pages properly. And to be fair, the guy should have used Wordpad on the PC vs. Word on the Mac since Wordpad can do most of the simple functions he tested. I just launched Wordpad on my QX6700 rig and it took about half a second to load, after I spent a minute finding the shortcut .
Exactly. If i cared about type delays, save and load times I'd do all my work in notepad. 0.1 seconds load time!!
Word is a requirement when it comes to functionality though. Granted most people don't use any of the features. So why did they buy it? 2007 is slow in some respects, but everything is on that handy little toolbar at the top, and once you adjust to it it saves you lots of time you would have wasted clicking through menus.
And what about audio and video experience; I bet that piece of steel would not be able to open MP3 file, not to talk about any kind of video. Funny thing to know, but not something to convince you today's PCs are not worth .
MS Office 2007 is single-handedly responsible for all of the woes, wars, pandemics, death and destruction in this world. I despise the ribbon more than anything in the galaxy. It's huge. It's divided into illogical and counterintuitive groupings. It reminds me of a CD trainer from The Professor: Learn To Use MS Office In A Day. It's for high-school dropout wannabe secretaries who need to look at pretty pictures to figure out what they're doing.
The guy who did the comparison nailed it with his first word. Bloat. Office 2007 is a huge, bloated garbage scow. And even though Vista "only" requires 15GB as free install space and becomes a bit smaller upon installation, it's still an enormous resource hog which slows down PCs to a crawl (as compared to various Linux, etc.)
He says right in the article that it's obvious that the AMD is more than a thousand times faster than the Mac Plus. That's not the point. It's that in 21 years nothing much has changed for the drudgery that forms most clerical office work. It's just as slow now as it was then.
Exactly. If i cared about type delays, save and load times I'd do all my work in notepad. 0.1 seconds load time!!
True. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 ( ) to which I added a 40 MB hard drive. Booted up DOS 2.11, loaded Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 pretty fast. Also played Kings Quest I and II and Loderunner and Subbattle pretty fast on the 4-color CGA display! And the 3-voice built-in sound chip was to die for 8). Only thing slow was my 9-pin dot matrix printer
That system is busy entertaining bacteria in a landfill somewhere, but I still have my Windows/Office 98 rig. That is probably what should have been compared to the Mac Plus .
And what about audio and video experience; I bet that piece of steel would not be able to open MP3 file, not to talk about any kind of video.
Probably not . I recall paying like $25 for Mod4Win, that played various Amiga Mod music files and maybe MP3s too, and required Win95 minimum. Still have a bunch of those Mod files around, since Winamp can play them as well.
MS Office 2007 is single-handedly responsible for all of the woes, wars, pandemics, death and destruction in this world. I despise the ribbon more than anything in the galaxy. It's huge. It's divided into illogical and counterintuitive groupings. It reminds me of a CD trainer from The Professor: Learn To Use MS Office In A Day. It's for high-school dropout wannabe secretaries who need to look at pretty pictures to figure out what they're doing.
I haven't upgraded Office since the XP (2002) version - didn't see the benefit of the ribbon as outweighing the upgrade price. Besdes, if I want a ribbon I can get a nice blue one from my wife's sewing kit .
I remember those Prof PC or whatever ads - some nerdy guy who wanted to make a fortune. Sorta like the nerdy guy who would teach how to do calculus on a slide rule or something. The only time I ever considered buying a tutorial disk was when my Dad called me long-distance about an error dialog box that popped up on his screen, wanting him to "Hit ESC to continue...", on a PC that I had given him. So I told him to hit the escape key to get rid of the message box. He insisted there was no escape key anywhere. So our conversation rapidly degenerated into stuff like "Well Dad - there was an escape key when I brought the PC down to you last month! What did you do to it??" and so on, for a solid hour. Finally, it occurred to me to ask "Dad - are you looking at the KEYBOARD??". Dead silence for 30 seconds, then "Oh - there it is!!" .
BTW, ain't Ninja Appreciation Week over already?? Or did your avatar forget to shave this morning?
I love test like that. It really makes a point. For years I have told my friends not to worry to much about buying the latest and greatest components for your computers because new programs will slow it down to what you currently have. Granted the advances have been phenominal in regards to visual rich features, but for an office worker, those features really do not help improve productivity. They are just there to awe and intise people to buy new.
office 95 to office 2007 has dramatic improvements for those who push the applications to the limits (e.g. macros, visual basic, advance functions).
This alone makes 2007 a must for serious Excel users:
Quote :
To enable you to explore massive amounts of data in worksheets, Office Excel 2007 supports up to 1 million rows and 16 thousand columns per worksheet. Specifically, the Office Excel 2007 grid is 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns, which provides you with 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than you had available in Microsoft Office Excel 2003. For those of you who are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.
Exactly. If i cared about type delays, save and load times I'd do all my work in notepad. 0.1 seconds load time!!
True. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 ( ) to which I added a 40 MB hard drive. Booted up DOS 2.11, loaded Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 pretty fast. Also played Kings Quest I and II and Loderunner and Subbattle pretty fast on the 4-color CGA display! And the 3-voice built-in sound chip was to die for 8). Only thing slow was my 9-pin dot matrix printer Cool, my first system was a Tandy 1000 also. I still have it and it still works good
Cool, my first system was a Tandy 1000 also. I still have it and it still works good
Wow, I had one of them too. But I think when my dad got it, it was a lemon. He kept taking it back to radio shack. I think the PSU finally died, and we no longer have it. It did replace our Trash 80... err TRS-80.
I haven't upgraded Office since the XP (2002) version - didn't see the benefit of the ribbon as outweighing the upgrade price. Besdes, if I want a ribbon I can get a nice blue one from my wife's sewing kit .
I remember those Prof PC or whatever ads - some nerdy guy who wanted to make a fortune. Sorta like the nerdy guy who would teach how to do calculus on a slide rule or something. The only time I ever considered buying a tutorial disk was when my Dad called me long-distance about an error dialog box that popped up on his screen, wanting him to "Hit ESC to continue...", on a PC that I had given him. So I told him to hit the escape key to get rid of the message box. He insisted there was no escape key anywhere. So our conversation rapidly degenerated into stuff like "Well Dad - there was an escape key when I brought the PC down to you last month! What did you do to it??" and so on, for a solid hour. Finally, it occurred to me to ask "Dad - are you looking at the KEYBOARD??". Dead silence for 30 seconds, then "Oh - there it is!!" .
BTW, ain't Ninja Appreciation Week over already?? Or did your avatar forget to shave this morning?
Beeeeeeelieve me, if you cough up the cash for the 2007 upgrade you'll kick yourself in the morning. I've been using Office forever and I can't believe that they have turned the world's #1 Office Suite into Microsoft BOB!
Yeah, Ninja Week is over but I celebrated so much that I was hoping to have another week so that I could have lots more sex!
.
.
) to which I added a 40 MB hard drive. Booted up DOS 2.11, loaded Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 pretty fast. Also played Kings Quest I and II and Loderunner and Subbattle pretty fast on the 4-color CGA display! And the 3-voice built-in sound chip was to die for 8). Only thing slow was my 9-pin dot matrix printer 