What computer would you recommend?

[livin4lax09]

One thing about flash drives, though. Someone said Vista could use them as "external RAM". I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't sound very promising, anyway. I have heard that booting from flash drives, and even carrying around installed applications, that is, something that can be run directly from the flash drive without installing it on the PC, is a thing of the future. But even the fastest hard drive is a weak substitute for RAM, and flash drives can be thought of as very SLOW hard drives, at least when it comes to writing. This is principally because flash technology requires "erasing" sectors before the contents can be altered. Better to use flash drives how they were meant: as large, convenient, portable storage.

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=20100

whether it will work well or not is a whole different story. But it will work.

[mwfanelli]

I should have been clearer. MacOS is fine as long as you keep up with the updates and use a virus scanner. I've not heard of spyware on Macs yet but that will come.

FWIW, there is no evidence at all that "MacOS is more secure than Windows." In the short time MacIntel has been out, the viruses have been numerous. As MS pretty much has the entire market, that's what hackers concentrate on. MacOS would be no more secure under that level of attack. In fact, it might be worse as so many Mac users are complacent about security.

[MarcusK]

Hahaha....true dat Michael....true dat

I was not trying to defend the Mac and I have not converted to the inel Mac because of the many bugs in it....

As for the viruses.... well that's exactly why i like the Mac...it aint got that many attackers and has one known virus (maybe they released a couple more, but in general, its pretty good no??)

[Rocket_Scientist]

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=20100

whether it will work well or not is a whole different story. But it will work.

Ah.. yes... Well, the article talks about "pre-fetching", presumably at boot-up? So, there would not be a lot of "swapping" in and out of the flash dirve, hence mostly reading from it, and little writing to it. I have no doubt the technology is possible, but I still don't see how this would be an improvement over a normal hard drive. Maybe Vista is slower than the flash drive anyway, so you won't notice it?