Upgrading to... XP?

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I have a fair bit of software that now needs XP or Vista. I thought that now was the time to upgrade my desktop so I can run it all on my nice new screen, rather than the small-dull-and-tiny screen of my laptop.

As my machine is quite sufficient at the moment, I didn't really want to upgrade the hardware. However, at nearly 3 years old it wasn't quite beefy enough for an upgrade to Vista, so I went for XP.

I have spent most of the past couple of days (in between work) wiping the hard drive and installing XP and all of the other programs that I need. A few comments:

  • Why are there no attractive yet practical XP themes?
  • How can Logitech support say there's no problem with their mouse software when the 50MB driver download doesn't recognise anyone's mouse?
  • I have already had Outlook 2007 crash 3 times and Outlook Express crash twice. Microsoft need to work on their testing procedures.
  • I am now two mini games and one boss level away from completing Wario Ware on my DS. I had forgotten how much waiting was involved when installing Windows.
  • My search for a competent light-weight text editor appears to be over - I missed the latest release of Textpad, which seems to fulfil all of my requirements. Well, nearly all.

I haven't installed any games yet - that's a cunning way to remind me to do work. And by not upgrading to a Vista machine, I've also saved myself the pain of having to install and play all of those boring and ugly-looking DX10 games that are about to come out *sob*.

In other news, my Perl framework proceeds slowly, held up by my urge to write hundreds of unit tests for each 10 line subroutine. At least nobody can accuse me of not being thorough.

Comments

radiac

So I should not just replace one proprietary operating system with another, but I should pick a minority proprietary operating system that is locked in to overpriced hardware and only provides half of the software that I need, just so that I can have the added cost of re-licensing the few programs it does support? :p

I will get a mac, but not as a replacement for my WXP machine - I've already moved to Windows from a minority OS because I needed what other people had. Although there's a great deal of software on the Mac that I would like to use, it can't replace my main desktop, it's just too incompatible. And anyway, if I didn't need XP on my main machine, I'd probably go with Ubuntu - at least that way I'm free to buy what hardware I want. But I'd still keep Windows around for the games ;)

indie

I was like you once radiac, now I'm a mac fan boy ;)

My shiny MacBook Pro has a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 160GB drive, Radeon X1600, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, 802.11n WiFi, 1680 x 1050 screen, Dual Layer DVD Writer and lots of nice stuff like a backlit keyboard, a built in webcam, external Dual Link DVI port, Firewire 400/800, decent speakers and optical in/out.

I bet you can't find a laptop that has all that for the £1600!

Oh and you get a nice suite of media apps with it, Movie Editing, DVD and Music creation. You can get MS Office for it, Adobe do Studio for it, OS X is based on FreeBSD so I can support all the nix stuff we have at work easily, I can run Apache on a real nix machine locally for all my testing and the best thing... thanks to that lovely intel chip inside I've got Vista installed on another partition for when there just isn't a mac alternative, C&C3 ;)

indie

OH MY GOD, it's Mr Stubbs, Another Boro lad!

radiac

Hi indie, been meaning to e-mail you for... years!

Problem is that I've got all my stuff for Windows, and I have a Windows desktop and laptop. I would have to buy a new mac version of Office, and it wouldn't be Office 2007, so I'm guessing it wouldn't support the new file formats.

Then there's the Adobe stuff - I have a single license for my desktop and my laptop. If I moved my desktop to a Mac, I could transfer the Adobe license from PC to mac, but apparently you can't run it on both at the same time; I would either have to buy a second copy of the software for my laptop, or I'd have to buy a mac laptop too.

Windows isn't brilliant, but it's just too expensive to move, and I can't see any benefits worth that much to me. Once it's all set up, it's pretty stable - XP has had no crashes since install day, and my w2k machine didn't have any real problems in years. The nix crossover would be nice, but I have Debian servers on my network anyway, and I run a VM with Debian on my laptop for Apache when off-site.

But I think your last bit sums it up - I'm pretty sure I'm just trying to come up with excuses to stick with Windows for the gaming ;)

indie

You're right, Office for Mac doesn't support .docx but what I was trying to get at is dump your current laptop, get a MacBook Pro and use that as your Windows laptop for when you need Windows, it'll run Windows natively with no problems at all.

The spec is fantastic for the cash, your clients will think you're a flash bastard (you are aren't you?) and there's a program called Parallels Desktop which lets you run your Windows apps inside OS X without any emulation.

radiac

Mmm, maybe! Still not convinced, but will look into it more when the time comes to replace the laptop - it's still a bit too young at the moment.

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