My MacBook Pro has recently died, and the repair costs would be better used going towards a replacement laptop rather than repair the old one. I therefore find myself using a combination of OSX Mountian Lion on a desktop, and Windows 7 on a laptop, at least until I’m ready to buy something new. It’s been a while since I used Windows so much.
It’s an interesting time to be putting a fairly substantial foot back into the Microsoft world. From my own point of view, quite a lot of my computing equipment is getting on enough for replacements to be falling due over the next few months or so. From the market’s point of view, Windows 8 is about to shake quite a few things up in a way which may well set the weather for the next decade of personal computing.
In the meantime, I find myself enjoying the delights and frustrations of being bi-technical.
On the one hand, I have some software which only runs on one platform. I can largely work round that, but it is inconvenient not being able to work on all the same files on both desktop and laptop. On the other, I’m rediscovering how much better the Windows version of Office apps are than their Mac versions. using Word in Windows is both more elegant and more powerful. I’m also re-acquainting myself with the delights of Windows Live Writer, which is an excellent blogging tool.
It is also most excellent to be able to add a bookmark, and then right-click in the bookmarks menu to call up the “sort by name” option immediately. All OSX browsers make this obviously useful function ridiculously obscure or difficult. In Safari you actually have to export them to a folder, order them, and re-import them. Bizarre.
The biggest frustration comes from misplacing keys for ingrained shortcuts. I find myself hitting the wrong keys for CTRL and CMD combinations as a matter of routine, and then wondering why the system isn’t doing what I want. I’m not sure how long it will take for me to compensate for that sort of thing.
All in all, however, I find there is remarkably little to choose between the operating systems. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.
It’s not a bad time to be forced into a bi-technical life.
