Survey: What do you compute on?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 03. 8.07
When I attended the Toronto Transit Base Camp I noticed that the macs outnumbered the PC's 6 to 1. When I looked at the comments on Tim's post about enano computers I was intrigued by the change in attitudes toward computer hardware. I work on a home-baked big honking intel machine designed for CAD but now just posting TreeHugger. Like Paul Kedrosky , I now work online for word processing and spreadsheets. I was tied to PC's for affordable contact management, then Bigcontacts came along. The OS and software, the speed of the computer and the video card drove everything but they are fading away as the internet becomes the computer. What are you doing? A two part survey so be sure to click through to below the fold.
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I have a desktop PC on Windows, but my heart is with Linux, and someday I'll have a Mac.
I can't truly vote on this topic.... I've got a PowerMacG5 on my office desk, a standard sized Linux desktop at home, and for travel, my fiance and I have nice small windows laptop. Then don't forget my Treo (PalmOS) that is my mobile device of choice.... So I'm a bit of everything!
I can't vote on this either. I use windows at work and have an imac and ibook at home.
My professional experience has been that you need to be well versed on as many platforms as possible, increasingly that involves mobile platforms as well.
Not to mention some of those new shiny macs could be running any OS. The box does not tell you as much as it used to.
I'm using an iMac, so I voted small form factor... this thing uses laptop processors and has no internal expansion, seems sorta SFF to me.
At home I have a 4-year-old DELL Pentium 4 running XP and Ubuntu Linux (my backup computer).
My workhorse is a self-assembled AMD Athlon 64x2 tri-boot (XP, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE) (!)
I boot into XP about 5% of the time--mostly for Quicken and Photoshop.
At work it's Mac G5's...
Where is the all of the above?
I have my personal laptop running Linux, and my work laptop running Windoze and my mini-itx in my truck running linux
Running a 6 year old (with minor updates here and there) PC tower, but I'm saving as much as I can to get a MacBook Pro.
I wonder how many people on this survey are happy with their computer as it stands now - or hoping to upgrade/downgrade (as the case may be) in the near future.
I'm on a gaming spec'd PC right now, buy I aim to buy a MacBook very soon. For a multitude of reasons, I am refusing to go to vista. I would be just as happy running 98 or even 95 right not.
I have four PCs and a server...
My primary/personal PC is my work laptop: 100% Ubuntu Linux with a Windows VMWare image for occasionally logging into Groove (it sucks--but my company uses it). It is an HP Compaq nc6220. Powered on about 14 hours a day.
At home my wife's PC is a 4-year-old Compaq running Ubuntu Linux with a Windows partition for Print Shop Pro when she needs to work from home (which is very rare). Powered on 24/7 (mostly because backups and updates run overnight).
My other PC is my home theatre system: A custom-built Shuttle XPC running Ubuntu Linux and MythTV. I use it to watch TV/movies on a 27-inch Princeton monitor. It is also setup to play various games (MAME, NES, SNES, Linux native games, etc) but I rarely do that anymore. Powered on 24/7 because my server backs up to it every night.
Then there's my old desktop PC which I used before my laptop. It is powered off 99% of the time since I'm using my laptop for just about everything these days. It is a custom-built PC with a Pentium 4, a gig of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, and 3 hard drives... Ubuntu Linux
My server is an AMD box hosted with ServerPronto.com. 100% Gentoo Linux. Powered on 24/7.
Power usage:
Laptop: 20W at idle, 60W when fully in use.
Wife's PC: 70W no matter what the hell it is doing.
MythTV PC: 80W
Old Desktop: 140W AT IDLE!
-Riskable
http://riskable.com
I run a sustainability site (LighterFootstep.com), and we've noticed an unusually high percentage of Mac users among our readership.
Looking at the numbers over the past 30 days:
Windows (all versions): 74%
Mac (PPC and Intel): 22%
Linux: 3%
Other: 1% (We've noticed some Solaris users recently)
If you assume a Mac market penetration of about 5% -- some enthusiasts think it's higher -- the percentage of Mac users on Lighter Footstep is pretty high compared to the general population.
We also have an insanely high percentage of Firefox users: 48% (all versions). The sample above is about 10,000 unique visitors.
Don't entirely know what to make of that. There's nothing inherently "green" about them, but Macs seem to go with environmentalists like peas and carrots (as Forrest Gump might say).
Everyone associated with our site and almost all of my close friends are Mac users.