James Fallows vs. Vista
James Fallows continues his war against bad hardware and software:
My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..):
The sublime elegance of VMWare Fusion... once it was installed, it let me run PC programs and Mac programs side by side, in normal screen windows from which you can cut and paste text back and forth. My cherished PC program Zoot is there in a window right alongside the Mac's Scrivener or DevonThink Pro. And so are Microsoft Outlook and Word 2007. I have learned to be skeptical of the assurance that something "just works." But for me, over three months, Fusion has just worked.... Of course... under Fusion they are actually running on Windows XP, not Vista as on this ThinkPad.... This leads us to the second point for the day:
The bottomless villainy of Vista. I am sure I would not be in the middle of switching platforms now if I hadn't bought a Vista-equipped laptop 15 months ago.... [N]early a year and a half after it went on the market, Vista is still an unbelievable dog (as many senior Microsoft officials knew before it was released.)... 99% of the problem turns on slowness... slow to start up, slow to shut down, slow to detect and connect to wireless networks, slow to get programs like Outlook up and running.... It has taken my Vista/ThinkPad at least eight minutes to come fully to life, to recognize the local wifi network, to become responsive with Outlook, to stop its disk churning.... The MBAair was ready to go in well under one minute....
The willful inelegance of the Mac keyboard.... Whether or not the Mac layout is objectively better or worse than the PC's, it's different, which requires countless small adjustments....
Sooner or later, three more points (including about MBA's battery, operating temperature, and so on)...
