I brought a Dell Inspiron PC. Cheapie compared to the Powerbook I did own at around 1500 usd, but with a slightly better spec. [Note, the Powerbook is 18 months old now].
My first problem, no documentation telling me what to do. Apparantly I was meant to turn it on. I dunno about the rest of you, but I expect to have to charge up batteries sometimes, so I pressed the power with some doubt, after failing to find instructions. First thoughts... Music on the intro screen. Very weird. The rest of the setup was much the same as Apple, and then things were setup, quite happily. I had brought a wireless card with it, so I plugged it in, thinking thigns would be good. No. Not at all. Network silence. After much research [I would call Dell, but it's Xmas so I thought I'd try my hand first] I read websites that say that my router [a standard wireless Netgear router] and XP are not compatible. XP SP1 removed the ability to add a hexadecimal WEP key and so I have a choice of only connection over the LAN, removing encryption from my network or buying a new router. First I'll call Dell to confirm though. The wireless card comes from Dell, and they'd installed the drivers etc, but the configuration program from Dell was only for pre-XP Windows. I had bought an extra battery so I could happily play games. With the two batteries the life is a bit more than the Apple. With 1 it's an hour or so less. The power cable is positively huge compared to my Apple space-saucer, but I like the pluggable sockets for CD's, Zips and a host of other things. Sadly this didn't work for me. When I start a game, I leave XP and need the CD in. Often I can remove the CD then, but I have to somehow go back to XP to eject the CDRom and insert the 2nd battery. Often this'll screw the game up. Other nuisances when I started the machine up, Norton Anti-virus, AOL and MSN all trying to con me into paying them money. I believe that education is better than AV software, that AOL should not be pre-installed for me [especially when I selected MSN (hey, why not)] and that MSN seems a bit too much of a switch. So I spent a little while configuring things to my liking. The mouse control on the machine is odd. 4 buttons, a pad [which is automatically in the 'tap pad for double click' mode that I hate] and a nipple-thing which together conspire to be worse than the Powerbook's simple one button and wonderful pad [short pause while I caress the pad, am writing this on the powerbook]. The keyboard on the Dell is crowded, but that might be due to the Dell being a 14" and the Powerbook being one of the widescreens. Many of these are things I'll probably adapt to. It's nice to get away from some of the pains of OS X. A lack of a decent virtual-desktop software [On windows I'm enjoying www.astonshell.com's AltDesktop] and a feeling that the UI is too simple. It doesn't feel as if it scopes to lots of items as well as the XP desktop does [organisationally I mean]. As part of the deal, I got MS Money, which I used to use back home. I've not got it setup yet, and I suspect my bank will probably only want to talk Quicken anyway, but this is somewhere where a nice deal with Quicken would help Apple a lot. I think that the iMac I have downstairs came with Quicken for OS 9 on, so OS X with Quicken would be nice. Many of the other applications from MS that came with the laptop need me to hunt through my CDs to have them available. All in all, I'm far happier to have spent 3000 on the Apple and 1500 on Windows than vice versa. OS X to me is still just a Linux screen [okay, BSD] with some pretty graphics and some MS applications. But it does a better job of this than XP can do currently. Cygwin is not quite the same as an Terminal. I'll continue to be an OS X evangelist, you'll be amazed at how many of the open source Java people made the switch, and are continuing to make the switch every day, but I'll definitely view Apple with suspicion. Hen On Mon, 23 Dec 2002, Ward Oldham wrote: > Henri, > > You're brave to admit it. > > Take a stab at educating us Mac folk and tell us what application(s) > forced you to go that direction. It obviously wasn't a choice between > operating systems. > > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 28. For more information about the LCS, go to <http://www.kymac.org>.
