Making the shift

I have been scratching my head for way too long over this one. My laptop has been dying you see, it is getting slower and slower and nothing will speed it up. The battery is kaput as is one of the USB ports and the DVD drive. Plastic panels keep falling off the bottom, and a crack formed on the top after a few weeks. It likes to turn itself off when it gets hot, but doesn’t save anything when it dies. Its fan sounds like an old car on start up. It is less than three years old, and it has always been a turkey.

A major contributing factor to its turkey status is its dodgy operating system, Vista Business. I was foolish to buy it, and loathe it from top to bottom. I have had to turn off most of its bling to get it to work at a semi-decent pace, so it looks like Windows 98 now. Way too much time is spent looking at a spinning wheel, as I wait for Vista to do whatever it has decided to do.

So I’m over it. The operating system, and its badly designed Asus container. The thought of staring at the Windows desktop environment for another three years does not fill me with excitement.

Today I took the plunge and ordered a Macbook Pro – my first since Mac since the early ’90s. I will put this PC in the e-waste pile next to three dead PCs and enter the pricier locked-down world of Mac. I am wary of it, but more than anything need a different environment to spend my working days in, and Mac OSX will provide it, for better or worse. The extra cost (a good $700 or so) is worth it for me just for that.

Having wanted to punish Microsoft for the time lost using Vista, and fixing websites to work on Internet Explorer, I made an inconsistent last minute decision to add Windows 7 to the Mac build – so I can still use all those obscure bits of software I rely upon for web design. Old habits die hard. I wouldn’t have done it but the cost of adding Windows 7 Pro to the Mac is half that of getting an upgrade for my near dead PC, or buying it off the shelf later.

For architect types, the ratio of offices using Macs to those using PCs varies from city to city. This seems largely dependent on which is the common CAD software used in a town. Auckland is a bit of an ArchiCAD town, so they use a lot of Macs. Melbourne is largely devoted to AutoCAD, so Macs are less common, though maybe some may be running it on Mac using Parallels . Today’s news that AutoCAD is once again going to natively support the Mac (including iPhones and iPads) may allow some architects to reconsider the Mac.

Those looking around the web for a comparison of Mac OSX with Windows 7 will encounter pages of vitriol from hard core Mac and PC “fan boys”. For a more balanced look at the two operating systems, you could try this vid:

Or for a less balanced and violent look at the platform battle:

I will try to remember to post about this again in a couple of months, when we’ll see if I’m tearing my hair out with OSX frustration, or I’ve become a Mac fan boy. Or, like the guy in the video, maybe I’ll end up liking both of them for different reasons.

Posted by Peter on 31.08.10 in computing