operating system

Help me, Apple. Please.

Everyone knows that I’m an outspoken Windows user. I’m running Windows Vista on 5 machines in my house (completely stable, mind you), and a server in my house is running Server 2003. My desktop is specced out from a custom build.

That’s why it’s interesting that I’m writing this right now. Over the last few years, I’ve slowly grown an appreciation towards Apple’s OS X. As much as I’m surprised to say it, I have actually (and am currently) debating becoming one of the so-called “switchers” at least in part.

Let me say first of all that I’m still a die-hard Windows user. Windows has been great for me. Vista is a solid upgrade over XP. But whether or not Vista or Windows has been a good experience for me (and it has), Windows is slowly becoming a dying brand. There’s a massive amount of bad PR against Windows, regardless of whether it’s justified bad PR or not (which most of it isn’t). Windows has lost respect … and I’m doubting that unless Windows 7 pulls off a miracle, it will never get it back.

At this point in time, like I said, I’m seriously considering switching most of my daily work to a Mac machine. The issue of not being able to run the same applications is a moot point now. It wasn’t 5 years ago, but it certainly is now. While OS X inherently doesn’t have as many applications availble for it, there’s plenty of alternatives. The rest you can pretty much run flawlessly inside of a Virtual machine such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

Previously, as a power user, the main reason holding me back from getting a Mac was the hardware performance. Regardless of whether or not Apple refused to believe it, both Intel and AMD had much more powerful chips than the G3, G4, or G5 at any point in time. The benchmarks were overwhelmingly in favor of the PC.

That, again, is a moot point since the transition to Intel chips. The only difference between a Mac machine and a PC now is the type of BIOS system that Mac uses.

The other thing that was holding me back was the software. As a hobbiest .NET developer, I rely heavily on applications such as Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005. You can’t run these on a Mac … or can you? Only recently has Parallels and VMWare Fusion fully supported both of these. I can run both of them in a Virtual Windows installation without any problems at all.

At this point there’s only one single thing holding me back from getting a Mac and getting the best of both worlds (Windows and OS X) … the price. As a power user and someone who is wanting to run development and enterprise-level applications such as Visual Studio in multiple instances and SQL Server 2005, an iMac + a Virtual machine just isn’t going to cut it. I’d be required to get a Mac Pro. Even with the education discount (and the discount I get from working for Best Buy), I’d still be forking out $2300 at a minimum. And that’s only with 1GB of RAM and an 250GB HDD. That’s pathetic.

In order for my needs as a power user to be met, I’d need to spend around $3200+ for a Power Mac. Considering I have 3 machines currently sitting on my desk, I honestly can’t justify that cost. And it’s not that I can’t justify it … if I had that kind of money freely avaiable, trust me, I’d buy a Mac Pro in a heartbeat. The fact of the matter is that I can’t. Even as a college student who is 1) living at home for free and 2) receiving a 100% free education thanks to the state of Florida, and 3) making a respectable amount of money working as a Geek Squad agent in Best Buy, I just don’t have that kind of money to spend.

Apple: If you’re reading this, I beg of you. Help me. Help those of us who are in the same position. There has to be SOME way we can do this without having to spend that much money.

Help me, Apple. Please.

An Apple OS X Experience

At this point in time, I’m exclusively a Windows user, with Vista as my primary operating system. Over the last few months, I have actually thought about becoming a “switcher” at least temporarily. I’m considering getting a 20″ iMac so I can experience Apple OS X firsthand, something which I’ve only been able to do at work, or at the Apple store. I really do want to learn more about Apple OS X and become as productive with it as I am in a Windows environment.

That being said, I took a trip to Orlando yesterday to do some shopping. While I was at one of the malls, I decided to take a trip into the Apple store to see the new iMac (which, in my opinion, is actually the first good looking iMac design). I stood in front of a 20″ iMac for about 30 minutes or so. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about the experience, but even more annoyances. Below is the list of what I found particularly annoying just from that 30 minutes.

1. Maybe I just didn’t find it, but where exactly can I find out how much memory or CPU is being used in real time? That’s annoying.
2. When I click the close button on a window in OS X, I expect the application to close. Period.
3. Why, exactly, can I only resize a window by using the handle on the bottom right-hand corner? What if I have the bottom of the window already positioned exactly where I want it?
4. Please, please, do not allow the desktop to display when Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or any other application like it is open. It confuses me what application is active and I really don’t want to have to look at the Apple bar to tell. OS X really needs to have this changed.
5. Put a real scroll wheel on a mouse like everyone else. I kept launching Dashboard when trying to left click.
6. And please allow me to secondary click a Dashboard widget to change its properties.
7. In iTunes, which I launch a video, why can I only resize the window proportionally? And can we please merge the library and play window into one? Reasons like this are why I stay away from Apple iTunes or Winamp for Windows. Windows Media Player is annoying as heck sometimes, but it’s certainly better than dealing with that
8. Apple’s Safari is a horrible user experience. Period. I was surprised that it was worse on OS X than it was on Windows.
9. OS X’s Wireless network switching is annoying. Seriously, if I have 2 wireless devices, what then?
10. Secondary/right click is a godsend. OS X better start supporting it fully like everyone else.
11. OS X Mail looks more like a to-do list than an email client. The iPhone’s SMS system is actually pretty nice. Can’t you make Mail look similar (leaving out the conversation dialog balloons)?
12. This is not so much as an OS X issue, but more of the overall experience. Most of my primary phone calling is done through Skype. It’s utter trash on OS X. Even Chris Pirillo thinks so, and he’s leaning towards switching to a Mac way more than I am.
13. Mr. Steve Jobs, stop saying iPhoto ‘08 is Web 2.0 compatible. I tried it firsthand, and it is not anywhere close to being this arbitrary “Web 2.0.”
14. Slot-loading DVD/CD drives are evil. What if I have a miniDVD that I recorded on my camcorder? I don’t care if it doesn’t look “cool,” please go back to a tray.
15. Apple’s .Mac is a total waste of money and you’re developers time. Either fix it to what it should/could be, or drop it entirely.
16. And why in the name of the Holy Steve Jobs do I have to pay that much for an Apple brand computer? This is the 21st century!

I’m torn at this point as to whether or not I should get an iMac. Windows Vista has a ton of annoyances, and I really wouldn’t mind switching to another platform such as OS X as there are, at this point, just as many “popular” applications that will run on OS X as Windows, and for the rest I can run Apple Mac Parallels or VMWare Fusion. But OS X has just as many annoyances, if not more, that really need to be fixed before I’ll ever consider switching entirely. Who knows … maybe in the future I will. I’m definitely more tolerant of Macs that I was 3 years ago.

Tier 2 support rep, please!

Staying on topic with my previous two posts about my upgrade to Windows Vista, I’m still very happy I made the upgrade and absolutely loving Vista. However, with that said, I have one persisting problem.

Randomly throughout the day while I’m browsing the internet I suddenly cannot connect anymore. Sounds like a typical connection problem, right? Think again. What’s even more strange about this issue is that only my browser connectivity cuts out. I always have mIRC open with an active connection to various networks. I always have Trillian open with several chat windows open. I have Thunderbird open which is regularly downloading any new email. Every single application outside of my browsers is able to connect perfectly fine. Yet as soon as I try to do something in a browser (whether it’s Firefox, Opera, or IE7), I have absolutely no connectivity.

But wait, it gets stranger. I can’t even connect to my router. Even worse, I can’t even connect to localhost. Yet I can do pings and tracerts in the command line to absolutely anywhere I like with no problem whatsoever.

Clearing all cache has no effect. Disabling/enabling the network card has no effect. Releasing and renewing my IP does nothing. Flushing the DNS cache does nothing. Manually editing my HOSTS file to point to a specific IP is pointless. Updating to the latest drivers doesn’t work. Heck, I can log off my user account and log back in and nothing budges.

And to top it all off on the weirdness scale, there is absolutely nothing in the Event Viewer to indicate anything strange or any error occurred at any point anywhere close to the time I lost connectivity. No failed drivers, no security restrictions, no memory allocation errors. Nothing.

I don’t consider myself to an MCSE or anything, but I’ll be honest and say I know a heck of a lot and I know how to fix most any issue that comes up. But this one has me completely and utterly stumped.

So I decided to buckle down and call Microsoft. So after going through 30 minutes of verifying that my version of Vista Ultimate had actually been activated, I’m put on with a tech support rep who had a hard time firstly understanding what the problem was, and secondly understanding that I probably knew a infinite amount more than her about Windows. But I decided to play along for the time being.

But after she asked me to uninstall the Google Toolbar from IE7 and use a proxy server, I put my foot down and said clearly that Internet Explorer is not the problem! I mean, come on? The first thing I said to this rep when I got on the phone was it wasn’t local to Internet Explorer. It happens with any browser and anytime I try to access something via the HTTP protocol. Apparently that flies over her head.

I also indicated very clearly the only way I had found to temporarily resolve the problem was to reboot the computer. Yet she instructs me to reboot into Safe Mode after I put my foot down and corrected her about the toolbar/proxy. At that point, I gave up and asked to be moved to a Tier 2 rep. After a bit of trouble with that, I at least get on with someone who knows what they’re talking about.

I can at least talk to this guy in technical jargon and he trusts me when I say I’ve tried things that haven’t worked.
So he gave me a slightly modified driver to try … which unfortunately required me to reboot.

I honestly don’t think it’ll work. So basically, at this point I’m just waiting for the issue to pop its head up again.

Lesson learned: ask for a Tier 2 rep right off the bat.

Windows Vista - One week after installation

Just under a week ago I upgraded my laptop (running Windows XP MCE 2005) to Windows Vista Ultimate. You can read more about this in my previous post: (here).

As I indicated in my previous post, I was outright impressed with the quality job that Windows Vista did when it upgraded my system. In the past, Windows upgrades were almost a taboo in the computing world. Windows 98 to XP? Forget it. Not happening. However, with Vista, this is completely changed around. It’s now a pleasure to upgrade.

Of course, it hasn’t come without its downfalls. For one, my printer drivers aren’t working properly since HP has yet to release Vista compatible drivers for their printer line (at least my models). My antivirus software (CA Antivirus 2007) supposedly works on Vista with a minor patch. This isn’t the case. I discovered that whenever my computer was idling and CA attempted to update, the system would entirely lock up, requiring a hard reboot. From CA’s website, another patch won’t be around until the end of March. I can’t wait that long. I’ve since switched to Windows Live OneCare. On a side note, I must say that when I was BETA testing OneCare, I wasn’t impressed. Since the release, I’m very impressed with its quality, and most of all, how it works in the background without so much as making a peep.

I also was enlightened to the fact that Intel’s 945GM chipset drivers for Vista weren’t as compatible as Intel claimed they were. However, that was readily fixed with another patch. And at this point, I’ve not seen any glitches pop up.

All in all, the only issues I’ve experienced have been with third-party applications causing problems (like VLC media player switching the interface back to Vista Basic every time a video is played). Vista in itself is ridiculously stable. And in the rare event of an error, it’s readily able to recover completely.

I’m thoroughly enjoying my experience on Vista. I hope you make the decision to upgrade soon. It really does, as the ad campaign says, make you “wow!”

I took the plunge - Windows Vista

I had downloaded the BETA of Windows Vista when it became available publicly and used it on both my desktop and laptop through a dual-boot scenario. This really got me used to the new changes in Vista so I feel very comfortable with it.

However, on my laptop, I have Intel’s 945GM onboard graphics card, which in the beta, and serious problems with Vista’s Aero Glass style (transparency, flip 3D, etc). Any of the new graphical things in Vista also were quite sluggish. This is why I originally didn’t plan on buying Vista until I replaced my desktop.

Just last night, I did a bit of research and discovered that Intel released a new driver for their 945 series graphics chipsets which support Vista to the smallest iota, including the Vista premium features (Aero Glass). So today, I took the plunge and purchased Vista Ultimate and upgraded my laptop’s XP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate.

In the past, you dared not upgrade a Windows installation if you didn’t want to have to deal with a ton of compatibility issues afterwards. I had reports of how smoothly Vista’s upgrade is compared to previous Windows versions, though when I was using the BETA, I did a clean installation and not an upgrade. I hadn’t experienced it firsthand until earlier today.

I must say with great enthusiasm that Vista’s upgrade procedure was absolutely flawless. Every file, ever folder, every setting, everything was perfectly preserved. My email, my music, my photos, my recently viewed/opened files, my playlists, heck, even my browser’s cache was preserved in the upgrade from IE6 on my XP installation to IE7 on Vista. Not one thing has gone missing. Not one application has given errors. Not one incompatible driver. I am thoroughly impressed with Vista’s upgrade procedure.

I also must point out that significant improvements have been made since the BETA in terms of speed, reliability, aesthetics, and ease of use. Vista is truly almost twice as fast as my XP installation on the same hardware. Vista can actually take advantage of my dual-core processor with 2GB of RAM, unlike XP. File searching is incredible and fast. Application launches are even faster. Boot time was almost cut in half, and I’m not exaggerating.

Vista’s new style is gorgeous. It has wonderful Aesthetics. 3d animations and hardware acceleration features execute with absolutely zero lag. Media Center is vastly improved over MCE 2005, and it runs flawlessly.

Vista is absolutely wonderful. Period. Kudos to Microsoft for getting away from their stereotypical bug-filled, unstable, and unusable operating system. Vista is amazing. I’ll leave it at that.