Well, here is my 2 cents…
Last November, a buddy of mine and I built a monster music pc to replace my mac pro. I have been a Mac guy since the late 1980s, but I felt it was time to build a PC.
i7 Sandbridge 3930, Asus board, 32 gig of Corsair ram…killer box, cooling system and power supply, packed with three large internal hard drives and external drives.
I got it all loaded up and began work. Here is what I found. It killed two hard drives that were connected via the eSata connection on the MB (externally). If the OS would crash for some reason and I had to hard reboot, it killed the drives. Two different drives at two different times.
Next, My User file somehow became corrupted. Corrupted User File…really ? Is Windows 7 that unstable, that just anything could corrupt the user file?
With Cubase 7, when opening it, it took an extended time to show the startup box (steinberg) and even though the list of songs were there, it took a while for them to be able to be opened.
Just last night, after spending three hours on the phone with Microsoft Support (level 2 support tech) we gave up on repairing my corrupt user file. The tech said I needed to create a new user file. We did, then open Cubase. The Audio was damaged…the driver, I mean. Trying to play a song, it had this terrible noise underneath the program material.
I was fed up.
I stripped my machine and re-installed my PCI soundcard, UAD 2 Duo card, hard drives and put everything back in my Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Core machine. I couldn’t handle the “iffy” of going out to work and my computer (PC) not being able to function.
Once I put everything back in the Mac…interestingly, Cubase 7 opened faster at the startup screen. The songs were available instantly to be selected and loaded. It took the same amount of time or faster, to have this song up and running.
And Cubase 7 was just fine. Songs created on the PC ran beautifully on the Mac. Where the PC did shine was in times of using Vari Audio…the processing of the file was just fantastic on the PC. The exporting time wasn’t any slower on the Mac than the PC, but loading East West Play piano was about twice as fast on the PC than the Mac…I will miss that. But, I will not miss the “not knowing if I am going to have issues today when trying to work” fears.
I guess I will be content with my Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Core with 12 Gig of ram. I will miss the potential of what the massive PC was supposed to be, but I will not miss the issues. I mean, Windows 7 Professional, should be professional. I shouldn’t have to worry if a frozen OS (which, I still can’t figure that out) and a hard re-boot is going to crash my User file, or whatever.
I’m just disgusted. I spend $2,000 on the PC build and spent 2 months researching before that to make sure we got exactly the right MB, processor, power supply, case, video card, ram…etc…and it came down to Windows issues, same as I have heard my PC User friends complain of down through the years…like having to re-install OS, reformat hard drive, virus issues…etc.
Do you get what I am saying here? I can count on two or three fingers the times I have had to do system re-installs on the Mac over the years…and I have been a Mac User since the late 1980s. I have administrated 25 or 30 Macs down through the past 20 years, my own and for places I have worked…they rarely had issues. Just repair the permissions regularly and things run like a dream. Could my issues with the PC be that the OS is on an SSD and not on a sata drive? Mmmm…
Okay, I might not sell the PC, but, wait…if anyone wants to spend a couple thousand dollars I could offer you a Monster PC (if you think you can master Windows better than I have).
My thoughts…for now, I’m gonna stay on my Mac