I’m growing a little concerned about Microsoft Vista and how it will run on portable computers. In fact, the more I think about this platform, the more I’m looking closely at my allegiance to Wintel.
But first some background:
I wasn’t always a card-carrying member of the Wintel camp. For a long time I was a Mac user. But then came the day when I was exposed to my first reliable noteook—an early Toshiba at aout the same time as my trusted Macintosh Plus began generating fatal operating system errors. Unfortunately, I was on deadline that day and the frequent appearance of the bursting bomb on my screen caused me to flee from Macintosh.
Over the last year, I’ve been unfaithful to Windows on several occasions, including one torrid weekend in Las Vegas with a tawdry platinum MacBook Pro. Since that weekend six or seven months ago, I’ve played around with the MacBook Pro hussy on several occasions, including one where I did a full immersion skinny dip, unprotected Mac OS X upgrade.
Having played around with a Vista release candidate software on a notebook computer I have some strong impressions about it.
First and foremost,. Vista favors hardware with a lot of memory and fast hard disks. I like Vista’s basic interface and the use of tabs a great deal. But the second you install its Aero graphical interface memory requirements get twitchy. Even with 2G of system memory, notebooks I’ve used running Vista and Aero are slow. Slow like chugging a quart of buttermilk for the first time.
There are things that I really love about Vista. It does help me manage and track stored data on my computer in new ways that help improve my personal productivity. And, setting up WiFi and other limited networks has never been easier. All of this is very important to me.
The downside of my choice is that upgrading all of the machines I use to Vista will be time consuming and costly. If I want to use the Aero interface, I’m locked in to an upgrade that carries the cost of moving my notebooks from.5 and 1.5 GB to 2GB. And then there’s the cost of the operating system software.
It’s little facts like this that may me cautious about moving to Vista, including selecting and purchasing a Vista Premium capable notebook.
But what gives me hope are new features that make convertible (pen-input capable) notebooks really shine. In fact, I’ve come to believe that Vista could be a driving force in the adoption of this class of machines.
Regardless of how I feel, Microsoft is going to have to work hard to sell Vista, and it’s going to be forced to rely on hardware partners like it’s never done before to make this iteration of Windows really successful. And inherent in this is the Microsoft message that Vista is not only safe and secure, but also free of filthy little bugs that bring workgroup or other networks, or my personal computers, to their knees.
Let us now open our prayer books to the Psalms of the Apple Macintosh, beginning with Book 10 of the MAC OS chapters. True believers in the Macintosh use these chapters as the foundation of their dogma. It’s a righteous belief system that has an old time religion and artifact at its heart. That reliquary is the Mac’s graphical interface, which the Faithful call “Finder.”
Mac OS X and family is rock solid. It doesn’t bomb and it’s an efficient user of precious memory resources. As importantly, it’s not yet prone to malicious attacks by virus architects (although I believe that day is coming).
I love the stability of OS X and it’s family members as well as how easy it is to upgrade from one version to another. When you factor in increased (memory) hardware costs that the migration to Vista entails, Apple’s Mac OS X is less expensive and may have lower support costs.
And then we come to the incalculable utility of DuoCore2-based MacBook portables, which can run all your existing software. There is some delicious frosting on this cake most people really love. The frosting is made up of “Widgets”-- small applets that let you run specific tasks. Over on the PC side, most widgets are limited to use on FireFox browsers, and they have yet to gain much popularity, except for people searching for open WiFi hotspots, or blogsters running analytical widget tools.
I love widgets for the Mac and rely on several to help me ridge the Wintel to Wintosh world. One example is something called iSquint, which translates .wmv and other Windows-based media formats into data files for the Mac.
What’s happening here in the early days of the 21st Century is that Microsoft’s long time operating system hegemony faces a serious challenge y a computer industry grandparent that has a product that runs efficiently, economically and cleanly.
I’m a big fan of competitive capitalism and I think Apple’s Mac OS X is a safe, technologically worthy competitor to Windows Vista.
But, I just sold my MacBook Pro to an editor friend who’s going to work in an Apple shop. Also, for now, I’m deeply committed to the convertible portable concept and Apple just isn’t there yet, although I expect they will be shortly.
All right Cupertino crusaders and righteous Redmonians, let the battle commence. Jim Forbes hunkered down in my mountain top redoubt connected wirelessly back to the world from rural San Diego County on 1108/2006.
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