Ten months into my life with Vista & Apple's OS X

It was October 23, 2007 when I bought my Vista laptop. I was faced with a business requirement of Internet Explorer on Windows and some forms that required PC based programs.  Mainly due to the small screen on my MacBook, a need for more storage and a tight budget, I decided to purchase a Windows laptop instead of a Mac laptop with a 15" screen or use one of the Windows solutions on a Mac.

I have done a couple of posts along the way detailing my journey, The continuing saga of a Mac guy in Vista land and A Mac user's conclusion that Vista is a quagmire.

Now ten months and many Windows updates later, I have a better perspective on the Windows world.  My Vista laptop works well most of the time.  It is hobbled by being limited to 2 gigs of ram.  I am convinced that Vista probably needs four gigs of ram to function well.

The updates have finally fixed most of the serious problems that I had with Vista.  Some of the real estate specific software that I use with the system still has problems with Vista.  The problems are minor, and there are workarounds, but they are still irritating problems.

My Vista machine still has a problem switching from our work wireless network to my home wireless network without flipping out the screen resolution and requiring a reboot.

In the meantime, I have upgraded to Leopard on my G5 and on my MacBook.  The installations went well, but I wouldn't call them flawless.  Dreamweaver will eventually require an upgrade if I want to continue using it.

However, I have no complaints about Leopard at this point.  It seems to work and even work well in the 1.5 gigs of ram that I have in my MacBook.

During any given day, I spend some time with XP, OSX, Vista, and also Linux.  My LInux is running on a Zonbu system which is the most trouble free of all my systems.  If my computing needs were simpler, that would be my main machine.

I should also mention that the Zonbu shares a monitor with my aging Dell Dimension which still runs Windows XP.  Some update along the way killed the KVM switch that I have, but I now function with just one of those machines running at a time.  With the workaround on the real estate software, I rarely need to slip back to XP now.  When I do, I find it snappier than my Vista system.

Whenever I pull duty shifts at our real estate office, I am in front of one the company's XP desktop machines.  I usually also bring in my Vista laptop and my MacBook which results in having three computers on the desk at one time.

I should also mention that I use Apple's Mail program on my Macs along with a healthy dose of browser driven Gmail on a domain of mine supported by Google.

On my Vista machine I use Outlook after trying both Windows Mail and Thunderbird.

The XP machine uses Thunderbird for mail, and the Xonbu machine is exclusively browser email.

I use iPhoto 08 on my Macs to manage the hundreds of photos that I take weekly.  I have been subscribing to .Mac for years so I am now a MobileMe user and have posted a number of albums. I am hoping to try Aperture this fall.

On the Windows machines, I use Picasa for photos.

I use Google's calendar app.  It is synced to Outlook on my PC but it also beeps me before an appointment by calling my cell phone which is not an iPhone.  The Google calendar also goes to iCal but i use iCal more for keeping track of the tides than anything else.

I am no longer a big spreadsheet user, but I use the PowerPC version of MS Office on my Macs and the latest version of Office on the Vista machine and Office 97 on the XP box.  Open Office is on the Zonbu machine and occasionally get used.  I periodically slip into a NeoOffice mode where it becomes my office suite of choice.

I am a Firefox 3.x user except on the Zonbu machine which is at version 2.0,0.12 or something like that.

I do not like the latest versions of Internet Explorer and while I keep trying to like Safari, it just doesn't work as well for blogging as Firefox does.

Most of my writing is done in a browser window.

I also use Pages, Adobe InDesign, and Photoshop on the Macs.

One of my favorite applications on the Windows' machines is Snaggit.

I tried doing my website work on Windows and never found a product as compelling or inexpensive as RapidWeaver.  The latest version of RapidWeaver has added the functionality to have Google Analytics code added on the page so I mostly can ignore Dreamweaver at this point.

So what are my conclusions ten months into my Vista journey.

1. The hardware requirements for Vista are severely understated
2. Given the hardware that I have, Vista is much slower than OS X, the version doesn't matter.
3. Outlook is a clunky piece of software, it takes far too long to open an email.
4. Contact management might be a little better integrated in Outlook, but it is not worth the pain.
5. The time to wake from sleep is unacceptable on my Vista laptop when compared to the MacBook's almost instant on mode.
6. I find that I am forced into conforming to ways that make my Vista laptop work better, they are not necessarily how I want to work.
7. I have not been impacted by a single virus or malicious piece of software.  My system seems to devote a lot of resources to making sure that remains the case.
8. While the Mac sometimes doesn't tell me enough about what is happening, the Vista machine almost always tells me more than I want to know and requires more input than I want to give.
9. In spite of buying a HP AIO Printer/Scanner/Fax machine, I find that it works better using VueScan with the Mac than it does using the HP software either with the Mac or the HP laptop.  I haven't taken the time to try VueScan on the Windows or Linux boxes.
10. There are still people out there who write to IE on Windows.  I am surprised but I recently started writing a blog for our company and was told that I was the first administrative user who used something other than IE.  They had to rewrite some stuff so I could use Firefox.

Would I buy another Windows PC?  I am tempted to say not until hell freezes over, but I have to face the reality that Apple has made a conscious decision to keep their hardware prices high.

Before I get the inevitable Apple makes better hardware comments, I worked for Apple for twenty years so I know Apple is capable of making great hardware and not so great hardware.

Since I left Apple in the summer of 2004, I have bought seven computers.  Three of them are Macs, two are from Dell, one from HP, and one from Zonbu.  As to hardware, the Macs have been the systems with the hardware problems.  I have a very nice 15" Aluminum Powerbook with a bad lower memory slot and a bad ribbon video cable.  My G5 had some early memory problems which required multiple tries before the memory worked.  It also had to have its hard drive replaced.  The MacBook had to be sent back to the factory because of discoloring and the inability to take a charge.

None of the Windows machines or the Zonbu have had any hardware problems. The Dell laptop which I have and which is a dual boot Ubuntu Linux system was dragged around college for a couple of years by my daughter and still managed to survive.

Logically this would drive me to wanting to run OSX on generic hardware, but I am not interested in the pain of staying ahead of the Apple software police.

The combination of iPhoto and Rapidweaver along with continuing support from Firefox for the Mac platform will probably make certain that my next machine is a Mac even if I do have to pay through the nose.

I am actually still a desktop guy who likes to work with relatively large screens so I might bite the bullet and buy a new iMac the next time around.

My experience with Windows has taught me that there is certainly a good reason to have a Windows centric IT Department.  I know the IT support guy in our company stays busy.  However, based on the problems that the few of us with Vista have experienced, I am not surprised that companies including Intel are holding off on pushing Vista through their enterprises.

As I see some of my colleagues fighting such basic things as resizing pictures, scanning documents, or creating PDFs, I am amazed at how much aggravation people will take before they have had enough and are willing to make a fundamental change to another operating system.

I have recently used Apple's new iMovie 08 and while I initially questioned the changes, after lots of work I have concluded it works better for what I need to do than the previous version.  However, I have to wonder how many user interface guidelines you can violate in one package?

The bottom line is that if you are an individual working with lots of photos, maintaining a number of websites, and publishing some brochures, you are probably better off with a Mac.  My guess is that factoring in software costs, the Mac is pretty close in price at least at the iMac level.

I credit part of the success of my Coastal North Carolina website to the Mac and of course Rapidweaver.

Right now it is a toss-up on whether MobileMe Gallery is a better solution than slideshows which I do with Rapidweaver.  My son who sits on a lot of bandwidth in Northern Virginia complains that the MobileMe albums are often very slow while the ones on my outsourced server are zippy.

You can make a judgment call yourself.  This MobileMe slide show, Recent Favorites, has very similar pictures to my Rapidweaver slide show, Coastal Carolina Collection, which sits on a Hostway server in a site that I maintain.

MobileMe is definitely easier to create, but it might not be the best long term solution.

In fact that about sums up the whole article.  The Mac is definitely easier and actually allows for more flexibility in the way I work, but I am not sure it will always be the answer.

Right now it is my platform of choice, but I will continue to monitor the battlefield.  As online platforms mature, the innovation might get to the point where I can use some of the blogging platforms to cover my main web needs.

I already use Typepad where my View from the Mountain is hosted, Blogger for my Ocracoke Waves, Squaresapce for another Ocracokewaves site, and Wordpress for a final Ocracokewaves.  They give me a pretty good taste of where the technology is headed.  Of course I also use iWeb for another coastal presence, but it certainly isn't in the same class as the others when it comes to flexibility and features.  It is an exception to the value equation in ny Mac universe.

Overall the Mac adds value to what I do whether it is creating a website , working with a high definition movie, creating a flyer, or printing pictures of our grand daughter on our new portable Canon Pixma 320 printer.

As long as that value is a reasonable tariff, I will stay on the Mac platform.  I will complain about the high prices, but I do not see where else I could go.

Finally I would consider getting an Apple iPhone but the battery and dropped connections worry me somewhat.  I would not necessarily lay all of the dropped calls in Apple's lap.  My wife has a 3G Nokia phone from AT&T.  We rarely have a phone call when her phone doesn't drop me.  That leads me to question the AT&T network.  I think that I will wait and see if the iPhone get another revision and perhaps another network.  My contract isn't up until January anyway.

Comments

[Ben]

You are right about AT&T. I wouldn't buy an Iphone until next year. There are some serious issues with the 3G version and the 2.0 OS (or 2.1) has bugs that will make you want to throw the thing. I'm still using the first gen iPhone and I have to say while there are some major improvements with 2.0, the bugs (like acting like it's frozen up when it hasn't and the keyboard going crazy when typing) tarnish the whole experience. The Apps that you download make the phone take forever when you sync it since it wants to back up your phone first. Plus there are a lot of upset developers who are getting nowhere with Apple when it comes to updating their Apps.
Plus the whole push thing blew up in Apple's face.

It's best to wait until March and see what SJ talks about at MW and then give him two months to deliver.

[AlfieJr]

wow, you got a lot of stuff! i'd be hopelessly boggled trying to work with all those different systems and programs. props to you.

question: why didn't you choose to run Vista on a new mac laptop via BootCamp or Parallels instead? just the initial extra cost? but then you'd not have to buy anything else for a number of years, not even a desktop. you could just buy a big new monitor (if you don't have one) and wireless keyboard for desktop work via the laptop. would seem a lot simpler.

I really needed the 15" screen for visibility on real estate forms. I got the HP laptop with a very readable 15" screen, 2 gigs of ram, and 160 gigs hard drive for $849 or more than $1,100 less than a MacBook Pro would have cost me.

That $1,100 doesn't even take into consideration the cost of Windows for the Mac.

Adding a large monitor wouldn't work because I have to use the laptop in a variety of places where I don't have an assigned desk.

I actually don't mind two laptops since I don't do air travel anymore it is not a big deal. It's also nice to have a complete backup if something happens to the one of them.

It's hard to justify a $2K laptop these days.

[John Davis]

You mentioned the possibility of buying a new iMac. I bought the iMac I'm currently using last year. It was the top of the line then. 24", 2.8g/500gHD. It is easily the best COMPUTER I've ever used. The screen is bright, gorgeous and the viewing angle is very wide. Leopard is snappy and has some very nice features.

The iMac running Leopard is a very nice machine.

John Davis

[Rob]

FWIW, your MobileMe Gallery was a better experience for me than the RapidWeaver site. The pictures were bigger and because the RapidWeaver site uses the dissolve between slides, switching between pictures was quicker with the MobileMe gallery.
Thanks for the even handed analysis though.

[daniel]

as per another comment I wondered why you would not VMwares Fusion on the iMac ( best of both worlds ) also on a Macbook or Macbook pro.
I am running an older Dell with XP. WHere the XP is OK, I am en ex Mac SE user and miss the Apple experience. I am close to going with Apple's 20" iMac running Fusion with XP on it. For I have a one person executive recruiting firm and need to have access to MS IE..... your a perfect candidate to let us business users ( opposed to a creative Mac user) on how the iMac is for business.

[Ian McD]

Have you considered installing X11 and ie4osx?

This would fix the requirement of running IE without needing to run Windows using Boot Camp or create a virtual machine.

http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

[ocracokewaves]

Turning the MacBook into a Windows machine just didn't make financial sense at the time.

Getting IE running without the real estate forms package would have only been half a solution.

Ideally I would have bought a MacBook Pro, but my recent experience with hardware problems on the 15" Aluminum MacBook provided some caution to spending $1999+ on a system that might only last a year.

Actually my inexpensive Windows laptop turns out to be not a bad solution. If I can get two years out of it, that's only $425 per year.

I have a lot of experience with dual boot systems and running Windows apps on Linux, I would just as soon have a second system and let it be dedicated to Windows.

I often have a lot of stuff going on my computers so I find multiple systems work well.

[Tom E.]

Hi

A few observations from a Windows-only shop.

I have a 1 year old HP dv2000 class laptop with 2 gigs ram and Vista SP1. Outlook is my email tool and it opens messages instantly. The hardware also works like a charm with my 22" desktop LCD, my 4 printers, and several USB device all connected via a 1-plug HP mini-docking station. When I plug in the dock I get a desktop machine in about 1 second. There have been no issues with the screen resolution switching from the 15" laptop screen over to the 22" LG screen.

Finally, this laptop wakes up from sleep mode faster than I can sit down after I touch a key.

Issues? Only one that is bothersome. Hibernation does not work 100% after I switch desktop/laptop modes. Sleep does work.

There have been no major hardware issues with this machine or my 2 Dells. My friends with Macs seem to have more failures than my experience with HP and Dell.

However, I don't use the software set that you need, so I don't share your issues with compatibility. I do run a number of Windows-only programs and have nothing that I need that is Mac-only. That makes my platform choice pretty easy. The vast majority of basic and mid-level computer users also likely find that is true.

I work with a small company that tried to make Macs work for about 5 years. Due to issues with interfacing with their Windows-based customer base they finally gave up and went back to Windows when it was time to upgrade the Macs. Thank goodness for that. Made my life much easier.

Tom

My system is a HP dv6000. I am a heavy email user. I just did some tests to provide some numbers for my observations.

I compared my MacBook with 1.5 gigs of ram to my HP laptop with 2 gigs of ram.

Both systems were hooked up to my network wirelessly. The MacBook was bought in July 2006, the HP in October 2007.

The Mac has ten different email accounts and the HP has six. Most of the mail accounts are IMAP hosted on various remote servers. There are some POP accounts on both systems. There are no exchange accounts.

The Mac shows 2561 unread messages in its inbox and the HP shows 2544. The Mac also tells me its inbox has 6060 messages which is well down from the 12,000+ that I had until I did some archiving recently. I couldn't figure out exactly how many were in the PC inbox but it would be substantially less than the Mac.

Both machines have been used several times today, but I did "Get Mail" on the Mac and a "Send & Receive" on Outlook on the HP.

Executing the get mail command on the Mac took two seconds, as far as I can tell no messages were retrieved.

Doing the send and receive on the PC took just over a minute. I also didn't see any messages retrieved.

I think the fundamental issue is how Outlook handles IMAP messages. Perhaps there is a setting where I can change this, but with everything working it is not worth the risk of something not working if I change a setting.

If I need a message quickly I just get it on the Mac.

My guess is the Mac caches the messages when getting them. Outlook on my machine obviously doesn't.

I had similar emails that had not been viewed by me on either system.

The message on the Mac opened faster than I could time it.

That was basically what I found on all the messages on the Mac.

On the HP laptop the first message took 8 seconds to open. I had one simple text one that took 40 seconds to open.

When I opened the messages a second time on the HP, they generally took about two seconds which was much faster but still slower than on a Mac.

I know that Thunderbird performs much better than Outlook on the XP system that I have. I tried it on Vista and there were some timing and networking issues. It wasn't worth solving since Outlook would sync with my Google calendar.

I am probably the ultimate email test for a computer, but I have multiple Macs and they have always been able to handle the heavy load.

I don't question your operating system choice. It is easier to have a single platform. I'm not sure it is better if there is a problem that hits all of your systems, but it makes supporting systems much simpler.

I have enough trouble keeping all my systems talking to each other to appreciate what an IT person must face.

I had about given up on Linux until I found the Zonbu which updates itself.

There has been a lot of talk about particular graphics chips causing problems on my HP. That could be, but I am just one user and pleased to have everything working even if it is slowly.

By the way my MacBook has probably worked better with more printers than I can count. I have two HP Inkjets, three Epson Ink jets including an Epson 4000 large format, my Cannon Pixma, and a Brother laser printer. It also worked well with Phaser and Dell printers in the last office where I worked.

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2006/02/heterogenous_ni.html

I don't have any trouble printing to the strange copier printer that we have at the office.

I would agree that if you have customers using PCs, you are probably better off using PCs yourself. It's the wrong place for Mac missionary work.

[Pecos Bill]

MLS is the worst offender of writing to IE only as everything they have is ActiveX.

You complain about Apple pricing. Pretty obvious that Apple sets price points and adds in hardware until it makes sense. They do that for their gross revenue and perceived value. They also have this thing called profit unlike all the other hardware manufacturers operating on razor thin margins. Those companies have to make up the poor profits by dumping crapware onto their master install images. Yuk. Some are lucky enough to have penetration in the enterprise data center to make money. That said, yes, it would be nice if Apple trimmed prices a little wherever possible.

Maybe if you spent the same money on the Vista laptop you wouldn't complain about it....... ?

[ocracokewaves]

I am not exactly sure I understand your comment.

"Maybe if you spent the same money on the Vista laptop you wouldn't complain about it....... ?"

When I have problems it doesn't matter what I paid for the product. We had some terrible problems with a Volvo Cross Country Wagon and I complained about it and got rid of it.

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/david_sobotta_weblog/2005/10/high_tech_car_l.html

Another thing not all MLS Systems are written to IE. Only one of the two that I use is written to IE. The other one, Carteret County, NC, my main one works fine on a Mac.

I worked at Apple and I know how they do their pricing. They charge what the market will bear.

To Apple you are a source of revenue and they depend on dedicated customers to pay premium prices.

If you don't think other PC makers can make money you might check the latest results on HP which are in today's Wall Street Journal.

To quote the alert that I got, "Hewlett-Packard's profit climbed 14% to $2.03 billion as the printer and computer giant saw strong demand for laptop computers and robust sales overseas. H-P said sales of personal computers rose 15% to $10.3 billion, with unit shipments up 20% from a year earlier. Revenue from notebook computers grew 26%, while desktop revenue increased 6%."

The hardware quality that I have seen recently from Apple isn't exactly what I would call sterling.

Maybe I am in the same boat as Michael Arrington.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/19/apple-is-flailing-badly-at-the-edges/

The only complaint that I have about HP laptop is that it is limited to 2 gigs of ram and is running Vista otherwise it has done better that my MacBook which had to be sent back in the first six months.

[Partners in Grime]

Apple loves you for your money; the Windows hegemony loves you for your time. I'd rather give my money to Apple. :)