Burning Lemons

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

We know you’ve been holding off finding out about Windows 7. Ignoring the reviews from CNET, The New York Times and others and waiting for the only one that matters. OK, uhmm probably not but given that the Beta download closes in two weeks this seemed line a good time to chuck in the obligatory 2¢/1.45p

Windows 7 is the next release of Microsoft’s inescapable Windows Operating System. It follows on from Windows Vista which (rightly or wrongly) received a lukewarm reception from both the tech and mainstream media which has put many users off upgrading. Indeed many people continue to specify Windows XP (an operating system released 8 years ago. It would be the same as turning down Windows XP in 2003 and demanding Windows 95 instead)

So now we come to version 7. Windows 7 at first glance appears to be a far less radical change as far as The UI goes from Vista as Vista was from XP. However one of the changes made has a huge impact on day to day use of the system. The taskbar now takes an approach to application management not a million miles away from The Mac OS X dock (we’ll leave the fanboys and possibly Bertrand Serlet of Apple to argue over who stole off who.

As a Mac convert I find the change intuitive and easy. It also stops the previous madness whereby applications names in the taskbar would become unreadable if you had more than 5 open. All the change is doing is basically enforcing The Windows XP option where all your windows in one programme were grouped into catagories.

One of the main complaints about Windows Vista was that it was slow even on mid-range hardware and that the glass effects and general UI - while pretty - were overkill for the average user. 7 keeps the effects but somehow tones down the amount of system power used to execute the effects. In my test (a Parallels virtual machine allocated 512MB of RAM on a MacBook with crappy integrated graphics) the virtual machine performed well, only showing strain while running multiple windows including a Windows Media Player visualiser.

So far (other than the usual unnecessary and inexplicable name changes) those are the main changes in Windows 7 however these along with a host of behind the scenes upgrades add up to probably the most stable version of Windows Microsoft has ever produced. While it may not win over Mac users it is certainly Microsoft’s best hope to stem the tide of Mac switching. But we’ll see what Snow Leopard brings…

The entire tech community was shaken today by the news that a long running rumour has actually turned out to be true! Microsoft has offered $44.6 billion dollars (more than the entire GDP of Kenya or Luxembourg according to the CIA World Factbook) to buy “rival” internet company Yahoo!

Many people have claimed that this will almost certainly be blocked by regulators but since Yahoo isn’t doing great and Windows Live (despite being pretty ok in my opinion) has totally failed to catch on. MSN/Live is solely reliable on it’s popular MSN IM protocol and Yahoo’s only good decision of the last 5 years was buying flickr. Google on the other hand has had significantly fewer mistakes GMail has grown incredibly quickly, the core search business remains really strong, Google Docs is catching on (slowly), everyone seems to have Google Desktop (though no-one uses it to search) and Picasa does quite well. Vista hasn’t done well for Microsoft and no-one seems to use Office ‘07 nor has the Zune and no-one I have spoken to really likes the new hotmail and Yahoo has basically done nothing, well it’s done lots but only the core service of Mail still does any good.

So the deal could either kill them both by combining two companies with weak product development or perk them up by combining two companies with good core products and good cash reserves for future devlopment.

Dull bit: Just to clarify Microsoft has only made an offer and Yahoo! is yet to accept or decline it