Re: Hehe.
'Expect that MacOS 10 STILL is not a good OS. They forced us to it at work because of a fanboi boss, and I have seen more crashes in the last month then in the last year of Win7.'.
Interestingly, we have the opposite issue.
In a room which started out life as having 4 Win7 boxes and two Macs expressly for CAD/CAE/Graphics, we now have 2 (barely) operational Win7 boxes left, there's been a whole catalogue of issues with the Win7 machines ranging from sheer bloody weird instability for no discernible cause (open notepad, crash the machine!) through to the old will-I-or-wont-I-boot-today?.
Meanwhile, the Macs just got on with the job, sans crashes, temper tantrums, etc. etc.
Yes, it may be the hardware we are running Win7 on is somehow crap, though I fail to see how, as it bloody well cost enough..admittedly, on a per-machine basis not as much as the Macs..but still, on paper, in terms of memory,graphics,CPU speed and number of cores and hard disk speed the PCs should outperform the Macs even for basic things like web browsing, but they don't.
..Oh, and here's the kicker, we have no viable replacement for our most used apps on the Mac, they are either horribly slow, or lack required features. So EVERYONE runs everything in a vm, which is slow and unstable...
Yes, there is a distinct lack of Mac software for some/all of the stuff we do, but we run our XP software in an Openbox VM on the Macs with no stability issues, in fact, we run our XP software in an Openbox VM on the Win7 boxes as they won't work properly natively under Win7 no matter what tweaks we apply.
As to the speed aspect of running stuff in a VM, for us it isn't too much of an issue (1 minute in a VM on the Mac as opposed to 37 seconds native on real hardware for the same task we can live with). As to the stability of the XP VMs under OSX, some of them run for weeks at a time.
(Lest you think I'm a Mac Fanboi, at this point let me assure you otherwise, in an ideal world I'd rather be running everything I could under Debian or Slackware, but alas my bosses are sphenisciphobes to a man..but if forced, I'd rather have an OS X based machine any day as my main desktop system than a Win7 box.)
'..We regularly encounter problems in this setup that cannot be reproduced in bare hardware running windows 7.'
Again, we have exactly the opposite problem, we can reproduce the same faults running the software under Win7 on several different hardware manufacturers systems, so it is some weird software-OS incompatibility we're having. In an ideal world, we'd get updated software, but that isn't going to happen for a number of reasons, one being that the software company plan no updates of one of the packages, the other being cost of updating licenses for the other.
I'd rather run the software we use 'natively' under XP on the hardware we have, but the edict came from above, no more native XP boxes..Win7 is was to be for support reasons, and our software will not work under Win7 running on bare hardware, but works fine running in a XP VM running under Win7 on the same hardware, so we currently comply with the edict from above.
Ain't IT politics fun?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
