A Month with Windows: One Apple Fanboy's Experiment

[Knight]

I am what many people consider an Apple fanboy - even my column is entitled No Windows for Me.

But I'm also a naturally skeptical person. Is Apple really, truly better, or have I just accepted as fact what others say about Apple?

I have decided to perform a 30-day experiment by completely reversing my computing principles to test this.

Full Low End Mac Article

[Chase]

Ahh, if I could install a version of mac os x on my desktop or notebook I would give it a try right along side you for a month, and see how I feel at the end of things.

Mainly I digress, windows does not come (off the disk atleast) with alot of great built-in tools of any kind, no office, no good image editing software, and so on.

I have a few notes here however (straightens them out), if pidgin doesn't float your boat (I know I never nejoyed it) you can always attempt a program called Trillian, from Cerulean Studios. They have a Mac version 'in the works', but what software isn't in the works for macs recently?

µTorrent, I give you 5 stars for finding that diamond in the rough, its the best one out there, though of course someone will disagree with me (but really, low footprint, fast speeds, easy unbloated interface, really now?).

Firefox, I could go on for days on that issue, as I am an Opera fanboy (no it doesn't have ad's anymore). I am not gonna go off and try firefox again either, I have already crossed that bridge a few times.

Office is good, but I have '07. This is the first time I have ever heard of ZipGenius, I have tried many others, I am fond of the technical feel of 7Zip, and it preforms rather nicely aswell.

As for paint, try Paint.NET, never tried it myself (to addicted to IrfanView / Photoshop teamup I have), but its suppose to be a good lightweight windows image editing program. Did I mention its free?

I how you don't die from your exposure to Windoze, if it wasn't for the fact I was raised on them I might of turned to a nice MacBook Pro isntead of this Toshiba Satellite i'm currently typing on.

I would be hopelessly lost if I attempted to switch to Mac OS X, due to my very limited experience in it, i'm sorry to say I am a rather savvy computer programmer too, so if I am lost I feel really sorry for an average user, who would probably spend all day fullscreening and restoring a window in an attempt to close it.

Anyway, I am glad you didn't go with Vista, otherwise you would really have some horror stories to tell around the campfire after this was all said and done. Good to go with the now aging XP.

After XP dies out I will probably goto Mac (hopefully they would of released it for general use by then, so I can keep using AMD!) if they haven't unscrewed Vista (highly unlikely).

[jon0pdx]

Hi Ben,

The only thing that I miss from windows is being able to do almost everything via the keyboard without having to memorize strange combinations like in the Mac OS. Sure some of the basic ones work fine and are easy, but from what I've seen, with any kind of complex software the Mac approach becomes very mouse reliant.

I've always thought this is one area where windows got it right. (It also made me aware of the focus for input as well.) You can press the keys serially, that is you don't have to hold them all down at once, but you can do them one at a time. As you do it the menus open up and you visually see the next level of underlines, so I didn't have to memorize the combinations. Sometimes within a dialog box you have to press both to get it to switch focus. I think Alt-space bar was the main window menu on the left.

MS Excel and Word use to just fly for me. Unfortunately I think, the new ribbon has done more to frustrate users, but it still supports this mode of operation. Just press the alt key and take a look. I did notice that if I use the old menu combinations, from memory of all things, the ribbon in excel still supports that. Alt - E - s , that the paste special item from the old Edit menu, which is very handy.

I've heard that some apps from 3rd parties didn't support this as well, but it is the only thing I miss from windows. Personally, the value of Mac OS X is that it is the closest thing in computing to being an appliance and I seem to be getting along just fine for now.

-jon0pdx

[frosch]

Leopard was never written for the iBook 133, why you would expect it to run well? This attitude that the latest version of a piece of software MUST be the greatest puzzles me? (i still use photoshop 4 on a 333mhz beige G3 - it does all i want) Also is doing the test on just laptops a little limiting. Should not one machine be a desktop with at least a 20" display as part of the test. Don't get me wrong I have been an Apple user/fan since 1988 and a Mac user/fan since 1989 and wouldn't use anything else but Apple.

[Turboladdade]

I wouldn't try to run Leopard on an older iBook either, but I must say Leopard is much much more robust and feature rich than Tiger. It's only been a few months and I already loathe having to go back to Tiger on my university's lab machines. While Leopard is indeed overkill for an older iBook, the though of having to do without it would be depressing.