Although OpenOffice is great, its word processor can't handle documents the size of a book (initially it would crash, now it doesn't but it runs so slowly it's unusable). I'm still tied to Windows because certain software tools only work on Windows. That will be worth buying just to play with. At Javapolis I heard talk that Acer is releasing a $300 Linux subnotebook with a Flash disk (no hard drive), and it sounds like it will have no hiccups when suspending and resuming. So there's a lot of promise there I could even imagine just having a desktop Mac (one of those 8 processor ones) and doing all my Windows work inside Parallels. And I've just installed Parallels and XP within Parallels, and that seems to work fine as much as I've tried it. There will be the inevitable comments to this story saying "why don't you just quit Windows altogether?" Indeed, my experiment with the Macbook has been quite successful and I have taken to traveling with it quite happily (at first I thought I'd need to carry a Windows notebook as well, but that has yet to be an issue). And in exchange, you get software compatibility problems. The chrome is prettier, but that wears thin fast. You don't really get a sense of any big improvement in the OS, which isn't surprising since they ripped all the interesting stuff out (the new file system, etc.). But it also seems like we're going in the wrong direction progress either slowed or going slightly backwards. One thing I notice is that his disk seems to be working all the time - Vista performing mysterious tasks in the background. Dad complained about the new UI for awhile but eventually got used to it. It was all preconfigured and preinstalled so it seemed to work fine - but kind of sluggish considering what a huge improvement in hardware it is over his previous machine. I decided it was time for a new one, went to Costco and bought what they had, which was a Gateway dual-core Vista machine. His machine, which was ancient but still quite functional, took so long to load and start this applet that we thought it had hung. Leopard will probably work correctly, and in any event XP also has a DVD creation program, possibly the same one.Īlso about a year ago, I was setting my dad up with some new software that involved a Java applet for printing postage. The program that does this came with my version of Vista (I don't know if it comes with all versions) and it does it quite well in fact, the only flaw I found in the Macbook was that its video creation program didn't quite recognize my video camera (it saw the camera, just couldn't properly download the video). Over the past six months I've used it effectively for exactly one thing: pulling video from my camera and making DVDs. There may have been a hardware incompatibility in the sound card, or the sound card may have just failed at the same time I was installing Vista in either case the company that built the machine sent me a new one.Įventually, Vista booted. There were definite incompatibilities: I had to upgrade the machine's BIOS by downloading and flashing new code into an EEPROM, which was fairly straightforward but not really designed for the average computer user. Since the old XP system was still working, the Vista experiment on the new box became a side project in which I occasionally dabbled. This was not so rash a decision as it might seem the process of installing new software is consuming enough that not doing it twice (once for a new machine, and again later for a new OS) constitutes significant time savings. I change these things so infrequently, I think, that I might as well move to the latest and greatest MS OS in the process. Whereas the agile approach would be to try out one small experiment at a time, I am prone to overreaching. Subsequently, I discovered the fanless machine (which also has two processors, but as dual cores rather than separate boards). My father even built me a special desk with an insulated cubbyhole for the computer, but the ventilation fans for that box turned out to be no quieter (the cubbyhole is now being retooled for conventional drawers). Since then I have been much more aware of noise in my computers. Years ago, in order to run concurrency experiments, I got a dual-processor machine that had so many fans it was like being at the aft end of a jet engine I even took to wearing ear defenders while programming. Future upgrades will definitely not be replacing this case (A TNN500AF), but just swapping out processors or boards. It weighs a lot because it's basically a big finned heat sink, with heat pipes connecting to the motherboard. The machine itself is a marvel: A silent computer, completely fanless (from ).
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