Jepstone.net

I’m in the middle of selling my 15″ PowerBook so I can switch
to a 12″. This is taking longer than I expected because PayPal, for
reasons they are not articulating well, is taking forever to give me
their money. The most lucid thing I got out of them is an agreement from
their escalation rep that payment by check would have been faster. But
that’s a rant for another time.

So, in the meantime, I’ve been working on a Dell
Inspiron 700m. As much as I loved my Actius,
I needed something faster and with a bit more screen. That last criteria
might make you ask why the hell I’m getting a 12″ PowerBook? The answer
is that I need a Mac I can open on a plane, and it will be plugged into
a 20″ monitor most of the time.

I’ve adapted pretty well to Windows XP, but it’s taking some getting
used to. Here are some of the things I’ve had to deal with in case this
helps out people who have to temporarily switch back:

Games

For a system with embedded video (64MB Intel Extreme Graphics 2 with
shared memory), this thing is not bad! The 700m plays Unreal 2004 quite
well, and Quake III does great. It will play DOOM 3, but poorly. (Cue rant
on how we need better quality ports of games on the Mac).

Out-of-the-Box Experience

What a nightmare. Dell installs all kinds of shit I don’t need. The
Intel Centrino software was a total nightmare. I uninstalled it, and
ended up getting rid of something like four totally pointless startup
items. And then there was the Sonic Update Manager, which was hitting
the disk every second. I had to spend a lot of time Googling to see if I
needed something, uninstalling, and crossing my fingers. I probably got
back 64MB of free RAM and plenty of CPU cycles, but to all the PC
manufacturers out there: I’d rather add stuff after I buy the PC, not
delete it!

Noise

This was a noisy brute. I swapped out the 40GB drive it came with
and installed a 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi drive that I like. I learned some
more about it, particularly that it has a quiet mode I was able to turn
on with the Feature Tool CD-ROM from Hitachi.
The machine is very quiet now.

Unix

I haven’t been able to live without Cygwin. Virtual PC runs really well on
this machine, so I’ve got Ubuntu with me all the time, too. I’m still
finding Linux power management on laptops to be too painful, but I plan
to set up Ubuntu soon on a spare hard drive (would rather swap than
partition) and see which OS gets the most love.

Mail

Thunderbird is OK, but every now and then, it seems to lose track of
where it is (mail messages either appear as blank pages, or I keep
seeing another message even when I click on different ones). I think
that Thunderbird just does a bad job of telling the user when it’s busy,
and I really miss Mail.app.

The Web

Not much different here–I use Firefox on both platforms, and Safari
on the Mac once in a while, so the experience is pretty mellow. I
usually don’t click on
the blue E these days.

I’ll probably come back to this post and add a few things to this list,
but overall, I don’t mind working on this Windows box. I look forward to
getting my new Mac, though!