Well after about 18 months of using a MacBook Pro I recently decided it was time to switch back to Windows.
Of course my wife, friends and colleagues all have expressed confusion on such a move and I must admit the first week was rocky. A brand new Dell XPS 1530 arrived with Vista Ultimate and after installing just a few basic apps (Cisco VPN, Firefox, etc.) I was crashing pretty regularly. Fortunately after a few days of installing all the updates and service packs everything has settled down and it seems stable now.
I still have all Macs at home and love the MBP (still sits on my desk in easy reach) but I felt in some ways that I just couldn’t come to love Entourage. Early on I lamented on the older version and just held out waiting for Office 2008 but even that didn’t get close to Outlook 2007 (with Xobni). Most of my day is spent in email and MS Office products and while the the Mac versions have come a long way they just don’t have the polish of the Windows counterparts.
In some ways I feel like I am thinking different (to borrow from the old Mac campaign) by switching back since conventional wisdom and recent trends clearly suggest that the best option is the MacBook Pro. So I can live with the pokes on Vista and that Windows is inferior to Mac OS X. Truth is that I am free to use what I want and for me Windows is a better fit for corporate life. I prefer Mac’s and worked around the issues they bring (Parallels for Windows apps, etc.) but in the end it is those Windows apps I used the most and I thought I should just see if I could make that work again.
I have pretty quickly found a new set of [free] tools to help with blogs and pictures and haven’t stumbled on any app that was Mac only. Since I have Macs at home I still rely on them for all my digital content management and now have both at home and at work with no need to launch a VM.
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