Steve Firth wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

Less hardware support? Less than XP, but more than Vista. You can
generally find most of the hardware you need though.

I don't see that as true. What hardware is there that cannot be used
with a Mac or for which there is not a suitable alternative?

There will be plenty of specialist stuff for which there is no
equivalent - lab gear, device programmers, in circuit emulators etc.

In most other cases there may well be a suitable alternative, one just
needs to take more care when buying. Support for legacy hardware will be
patchy with OSX as it is with later windows versions.

I have a mix of devices scanners, printers, keyboards, monitors,
projectors, internal and external hard drives, the list is endless, all
bought for use with a PC, some of them up to fifteen years old, all of
them work with the Mac.

Much stuff that sits on SCSI, firewire, USB etc ought to be usable.
Sometimes it comes down to economics though. For example I had to
abandon a decent scanner (Epson GT8000) when I moved to Win2k/XP only
simply because Epson chose not to update the drivers. Silverfast however
did do a driver for it, at four times the cost of a replacing the scanner.

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three
to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)

As far as printers go, so far I haven't found one that the OS doesn't
recognise and install the drivers for automatically.

When I bought a new Sony Alpha camera I plugged it into the Mac, the Mac
noticed I had a Sony Alpha and configured itself to accept Sony RAW
files in iPhoto. What more do I need?

Don't know. I was not trying to start a holy war, just commenting that
there will be less supported hardware on macs than for XP. There is not
usually any need for this to be a major show stopper. Compared to vista,
OSX has an advantage at the moment.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/