Hey, Well for my work PC I use a Server lol. I have a Dell PowerEdge 2800 with 2 physical processors. 3.2Ghz Dual Xeons which are 64bit. The downside is I only have 1Gb ram and a 73Gb SCSI. Because I don't use this for the intended purpose, and more like a home PC I need to do some upgrades. I was thinking of adding 4-8Gb ram (it handles 16gb) then came into a dilema. XP only handles 3.5gb and I will have 5-9GB once upgraded. Therefore I need to move to a new OS. My main considerations are Mac OS X, Linux (Cent OS or Fedora) and the dreaded Vista. What do you think? -Sohan
All my friends who now have Vista computers are saying it's crap to put it nicely. I'm not very keen on linux however, as most of my software I use daily REQUIRES windows :S.. Dilema
Then only get 4GB of RAM and use as much as XP will let you. Either that or check online to see which software will run under WINE, and which ones you can use alternate software for.
Personally, I'd rather have XP that can handle 16Gb ram. XP is perfect in my opinion. I heard vista needs a graphics card. My server has onboard at the moment and the option to upgrade to an PCI-E 8x card, but I could not find one :S So I don't know about that. I think Mac OS X is leading at the moment.
Each OS has their strengths and weakness. What will you be using the PC for? Personally, I use Windows XP, Linux (Fedora and Slax), and OpenSolaris via a mixture of dual boot, live-USB, and vmware. Fedora is a great Linux distro, although I believe Ubuntu is also held in very high regard.
Just working in general, making sites, reading email and MSN etc. An all rounder. I think I will convert my house into a Mac OS X house as their license is cheap and allows 5 PCs to upgrade. Does mac rely on a graphics card? Will it work on my Intel Xeon server?
The latest Mac versions probably need a better graphics card than what you have. Also, if you are using this computer just as an average user, 3.5 GB of RAM will be more than enough running on XP. Any more than that would just serve to waste your money.
Well, in my opinion... If you're only going to use your server/PC for MSN, checking email and whatnot, you shouldn't install all that RAM, since it really isn't needed. If you still want to get that upgrade I suggest you get *BSD . They're really safe (not many viruses written for them) and very fast when it comes to loading. I don't know how much GB of RAM they support, but I imagine it'll do the job. You can run the exact same commands on *BSD as you can as linux as long as it isn't kernel specific, so it really isn't that much different than linux, but oh so much better ^_^ If you want to go with linux, I suggest Debian. It just loads faster than all the others and that for me is the selling point =)
Window XP Pro is best os for working. (I'll pretend I didn't read the original post too) Can't you just run Linux and use Wine for whatever Windows apps you can't live without?
I recommend OSX for sure. Easily the best operating system out there. However, I'm a bit confused. How do you plan on running osx on your Dell? I know of the OSx86 project, which I do not recommend. Not only is it completely unreliable, but you wont be able to update OSX and it will be very unstable. Remember, Apple makes OSX for specific parts. Putting hardware in that OSX doesn't recognize has proven to be disastrous so far. At any moment Apple can release a mandatory update that will brick your system.
Hmm, I see. But on their site it says it supports Intel chips, which I have. Before ordering I'll drop them a phone call to confirm everything. Also is the family pack for 5 computuers, or 5 users on one computer?