After a little more than a year of OS X as my primary, I'm going to give Vista a go. I'm still on my first generation MacBook Pro but rather than firing up Vista occasionally in Parallels, I'm shifting over to the Vista partition as my default boot. I'm finally able to make the move because Apple's Boot Camp driver package has gotten good enough with version 1.4.
The really cool thing was that I was able to just copy my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles over using Parallels and then boot into Vista and I've got 90% of my standard environment ready to go. Not only did I carry over my email and bookmarks, but extensions moved over seamlessly as well. I love our cross-platform programs :-)
So, I'm back to my trusty text editor, UltraEdit and my favorite IRC client, mIRC. I've still got to figure out what I'm going to do for IM to replace the amazing Adium program. I suspect I'll end up with Pidgin, the current iteration of gAIM.
Depending on how it goes, I'll be back here sooner or later with a report on what I love and hate about Vista. Stay tuned.
Posted by: Robert Accettura | August 25, 2007 4:45 PM
Asa,
You should wait for SP1 (that's what I am doing) before trying Vista :-) Unless you are in rush or something.
Regards,
Posted by: Favorite Browser | August 26, 2007 2:11 AM
It would be nice, if you give us a short explanation, why you switch back.
Would be interesting!
Posted by: Fasse | August 26, 2007 5:23 AM
Miranda is a great, cool, multi-protocol open-source IM, of course the bad thing is that it doesn't run on anything but Windows. And you can spend an hour customising it. But they're working on it and I'm confident that with v1.0 the options should be almost as easy as Firefox's.
Posted by: Aaron Strontsman | August 26, 2007 5:55 AM
Yup, Miranda is the way to go on Windows Platform's.
I switch between Linux and Windows (for gaming) all the time, I hear you with copying the Profile Folders of Mozilla Products. Nice!
Posted by: Tyler | August 26, 2007 1:00 PM
About five months after upgrading to Vista Ultimate, I've finally downgraded back to Windows XP. Vista's pretty, but so much slower than XP is at the same configuration. I've finally got my snappy computer back. Hopefully your experience with Vista is better, but if not, at least you've got XP to fall back on.
Posted by: Bernie Zimmermann | August 26, 2007 5:52 PM
Asa, you should give Komodo Edit a try. It's the best text editor I've found, and it's also cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), so if you take a liking to it, you won't have to switch to something else the next time you switch platforms.
I recommend the beta version of 4.2, which has been rock-solid for me.
Posted by: Myk Melez | August 27, 2007 10:19 AM
IM services suck in general, but Pidgin and Trillian are likely the best on PC. Adium blows both out of the water of course.
I've used both platforms extensively, and still do. I use a Mac 98% of the time at work, and at home my primary computer is still my old Thinkpad, since my mini just doesn't have the performance I need right now, and I don't have a faster Mac available.
That said, my next computer will be a Mac again. I've played with Vista and just don't find it helps me. It bugs me, but doesn't help me do things quicker. I don't need that. With Mac OS X, and some great products like QuickSilver, I just find everything so graceful and efficient I spend more time doing work, and less time fighting the OS. Thanks to Firefox, I don't have to worry about having less of an experience on the web. For development work, Coda can't be beat if your a fan of simplicity to just let you do your work.
The geek in me loves Apache and bash right there for me to use.
Maybe I'm just lazy? I don't know. But these days, the OS really is more of a driver, and the web is the OS. I don't feel like dealing with something that should feel transparent.
To each his own, but for me OS X gives that experience.