Computer operating systems (or, "Let's start a fight!")

My old laptop had XP and it was fine. My new one's got Vista and there are some things I like about it, but I'd rather have XP.

 

My laptop had Vista when I bought it. Very pretty interface, if you have the hardware for it. (I do, but barely — a gig of RAM and a 256Mbyte video card.) Underneath, even more of the infamous Microsoft code bloat. The OS constantly accessed the hard drive, even after I turned indexing off. Didn't mind the constant security checks overmuch ... if anything, it showed how poor a job the Windows development team had done before. Nevertheless, I was reasonably happy with it.

But it used lots of RAM — consistently over 700 Mbytes. The page file was gigantic, which is probably why Microsoft coded up a way for the computer to use flash drives as additional memory on low-RAM computers. And it has enough RAM that a page file should have been unneeded. And it always struggled with my laser printer, which is far from cutting-edge hardware. A couple of weeks ago, it simply refused to see the printer anymore. Swore something was "wrong" with it.

I had been playing with Linux LiveCDs for a while, seeing if anything stood out. (In fact, I had installed SUSE Linux on my old desktop machine but it was a bust. Installed Ubuntu Linux on my hard drive last weekend, "just to play with." Nothing serious, you see.

I've booted up Windows once since then, and that was just to see if I could figure out Windows hid my Firefox bookmarks and Thunderbird address book. (Turns out I could have found both files more easily by staying in Linux.) The entire Linux install is 10% of the size of my Windows directory and it uses about half the RAM. I was already using the OpenOffice suite, which is a lot snappier on Linux than on Windows. There's an open-source DTP app that's as powerful as Quark (if not more), although the interface has some obtusities. Linux saw my printer with no problems — that may have been a Windows issue. If I can figure out how to sync my iPod in Linux, I may never use Windows again. Definitely not for everybody, though.

Just wondering ... who's our token DOS snob?

 

CP/M

 

Figuring Vista would be a cluster, I got a MacBook with OS X. Love, love, love it.

 

My parents didn't own a computer for a long time. My first exposure was Mac OS whatever during high school and college (these were pre-iMac and iBook G3s) in the 1990s. So, my first computer was a Mac. I didn't use Windows regularly until I got my first job and realized that 99 percent of the real world uses Windows.

But I keep buying Macs like I keep buying Chevys. It's just the means to an end, but I may as well get what I want and what I'm comfortable with.