Total Conversion

I have a HP Mininote 2133 with 2gb + 120gb disk. Its a decent netbook and came with Vista Business pre-installed. I quickly installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid and was quite happy with it. Some friends of mine told me to try Windows 7 on it because it was more efficient than Vista on it and so I have it a try. As the machine does not have a dvd drive, I copied the Windows 7 RC image onto a flash drive and installed it that way. It was certainly better than Vista and impressed me with its ease of use and excellent hardware detection. Linux is still better at it, but for the hardware that Windows knows, it handles it very well. It even redirected me to the appropriate Hauppage support page to download the drivers and I got most of the system working perfectly much faster than I would with XP or Vista. After a day or 2, the things that bug me still are the speed hit you take once you install the appropriate antivirus / security software and the fact that you get regular updates which requ...

If you look at the 3 platforms that I've used, namely Windows, Mac and Linux, I have the least experience with Macs. With the advent of the Intel mac's and especially with the adoption of a Unix subsystem for OSX, Apple has really impressed me. I am extremely frustrated by the closed nature of the systems and the way you get locked into their applications and hardware, but if you choose to run normal Open Source software on it, the Mac makes a decent platform. The hardware driver support for my printers, network hardware, tv cards, etc, has been awesome and the day to day reliability has been legendary. On linux, I tend to have the odd hardware issue as I run close to the bleeding edge distros most of the time, so I've grown accustomed to the odd crashing application due to the unstable nature of the repo's I used, but on the mac, that's not an option. You are forced to use the software in a "stable" mode and guess what, its actually not that big a deal...

I managed to get my own mac on an extended loan and I decided to give it a look from a techie perspective. I had recently gone through a 2 week trial of Vista and hated it and wanted to give the OSX thing a fair review before going back to Linux. Well. Its been about 2 weeks and I'm *VERY* happy to use the mac. I have a similarly specced Ubuntu machine running Jaunty and the Mac seems to kick its ass on so many fronts its scary. About the only thing that the Linux box has going for it is choice / variety of software, but for the rest, I'm enjoying using the mac a lot more. I spend most of my time on the mac and remote the windows or ubuntu boxes over ssh or rdp if I need to do something on them. For the moment, the mac has become my principle machine. This is such an unexpected thing that I am slightly embarrassed. I was also so pro-Linux and anti-Windows & and anti-MAC that I didn't know how to handle this at first. I had to be honest that my dislike of Vista cam...

After another extended blogging absence, I am back again with a spurt of posts. By my reckoning, its my first post of 2009 and it certainly goes against the spirit of everything I've been using for the last 5 years. It started about a year ago when I bought a Macbook for my wife. She just was not enjoying either Windows or Linux and after a short while, she seemed to really *get* the OSX thing. Couldn't explain it. She just enjoyed using the Mac a lot. I set up a dual boot with Windows because she was familiar with it, but at this point, I feel like wiping it off and reclaiming the disk space as she rarely uses it. I've looked at the Mac on and off in the last year and its been okay, if a little frustrating to use. I find the mental approach to using it is very different to the one I've been used to in Linux. However, things change...