Burning Lemons

In case you haven’t heard (and seriously that would be unlikely) tonight at 20:30 local time we’re meant to switch all our lights off for an hour in an attempt to save the planet or something.
Now while I believe that global warming is a pressing issue I personally will not be taking part tonight for the following reasons

1) All the lightbulbs in our house are low energy and use a pitiful amount of energy compared to the TV, this laptop, the microwave and all the other things I’m still allowed to run
2) It’s dark outside during Earth Hour and I need to work tonight
3) Scotland are playing The Netherlands and I’ll be depressed enough

Instead of taking part I’m going down the much more worthwhile route of avoiding waste - turning computers off properly, not leaving things on standby etc - rather than not using energy I really need to.

Comments/long posts telling me why I’m wrong welcome as always

My new Windows Vista sporting Philips 7511 arrived from PC World earlier this morning. Compared to the MacBook it replaces the specs are fairly impressive especially considering the fairly low price. For example the MacBook came with 1GB of memory, the new laptop came with 4. The hard drive is 90GB larger etc, etc.

However how does the experience of Vista compare to OS X Leopard. I’d never previously used Vista although I had loads of experience with XP and had given Windows 7 a go on the old MacBook. So here’s a look at a few particular issues

1. The boot time

Compared to my old Macbook which could be ready to use in 40 seconds flat the new laptop take up to 2 minutes from a cold start - then it can be up to 30 seconds until the computer is actually usable. This is a major step backwards for me and I now only shut down the computer when I really, really have too - therefore wasting power - however since I only have to reboot about once a fortnight this isn’t a huge issue

2. The Interface

Vista is prettier (in my opinion at least) than Mac OS X - so long as your computer can run it the you should be fine - flip 3D is a lovely feature although I don’t really use it. Apps launch reasonably quickly and the new start menu works quite well - although an option to go back to the old flip out XP style structure without going back to a Windows 95 style menu would be lovely.

3. Searching

Windows desktop search is not nearly as good as spotlight. It is slower, doesn’t index properly and often leaves deleted files in search results for days - however a switch to Google desktop search sorted this issue for me.

I’ll come up with more comments for you over the next few days but so far going back to Windows has been far better than I expected and it’s nice to be able to use a lot of applications (OneNote I’m looking at you) without Mac versions again.

As anyone following my Twitter over the last few days will probably know (hey if you want all the lastest news on me you need to follow. What you don’t? Oh…) my 13 month old MacBook (just out of warranty natch…) has finally died a fairly spectacular death. A conversation with the nice people at the Glasgow Apple Store has confirmed that the logic board is to blame and fixing this will cost an amount of money not disimilar to the cost of the laptop. After spending the next few hours cursing the fact that I didn’t buy Applecare I got on to the subject of what to do next. The simple fact is that I cannot afford a new MacBook and aren’t particularly keen on buying an old one off ebay. Beacause of this I have little choice but to rejoin the Windows world I left in 2006 with the purchase of a Mac Mini (which cost £500 less than the macbook and is still going strong).

So having trawled through the world of computer websites I settled on an Acer machine running Windows Vista Home Premium with 4GB of RAM. As much as I have hated on Vista I have chosen to run with it for 4 reasons

1) Its been out for two years. Therefore they must be someway towards fixing it
2) I don’t really have any choice
3) I’ve had a look at Windows 7 and it doesn’t look that bad so the option to upgrade soonish is there
4) This laptop is really only a stopgap for the next 18 or so months

So over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a comparison of my Mac OS X experience to what I find with Vista. I hope you’ll stay posted