In which we bring a Windows 7 laptop into a house with three Mac workstations.
As anyone who reads this blog is well aware, as a Creative Professional, I am a Mac user. Now I have to lead in with the total disclaimer straight off. I try not to take sides in the platform wars, and when people ask me about computers, I tell them to buy the machine that does the job you need to do at the time you need it. That will vary on the required tasks, if you’re an office drone, a designer, a gamer, or just surfing the web, fetching your emails and hitting Facebook. I also tell people, “buy the heaviest iron you can afford and stuff with as much RAM and the biggest hard disk drives you can afford.”
But at the time I got into my career, and we’re talking 1980 B.C. (“Before Computers”) and when desktop publishing came on the scene, the Macintosh was a dominantly superior platform for graphics and design. The Mac generally sustained an advantage through the 90’s and into the early 2000s due to it’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) and ease of use. My forays into the Windows PC world, as I got introduced to web design and the pain of cross platform testing, did not impress me. Windows machines, particularly entry level and midrange boxes that were typical of the target markets I was designing sites for, were difficult and the Windows OS felt clunky, kludgy, and fraught with security issues that remain a concern to this day. But I did get reasonably familiar with the systems. Most folks don’t recall how awful the incompatibilities between the “Big Four” browsers of the late 90s – Explorer and Netscape on the Mac and PC were. It was just dreadful and an excruciating testing process.
Some years later, I was the Art Director for a small Art Collectors Magazine, and as the “Art Guy,” I was also drafted as de facto Webmaster, Network Administrator and Tech Support Roustabout for a mixed office of six Macs and Twelve PCs. Macs for Editorial and Art and PCs for everyone else, plus an aging HP server under a desk in a closet with a whopping (at the time) 40 GB Drive. Yes, we had to archive the magazine pages the day after it went to press to make room for the next issue. I won’t go into the horrifyingly random collection of HP inkjets needing more than 15 different ink cartridges and stubbornly resisted any kind of color calibration. The good old days. We had two brand new E-Machines boxes that ran the then-brand-new Windows ME. What a nightmare. Those two boxes seemed to suck SPAM, viruses, trojans, malware and spyware out of thin air, right though the hardware firewall (which I insisted we install) and the Enterprise version of Norton’s that seemed to protect the WIN 97 machines perfectly fine. Had to scrub them twice a day. It wasn’t till Windows XP that the OS seemed to me to settle down and be a useful platform for ordinary non-technical users. Sorry, for all my geek and nerd friends and colleagues, we’re talking to ordinary folks today. Security issues of course persist, and are not absent on the Mac, despite the mythology. Eternal vigilance the price of freedom and all that.
This was the background I brought to the table when my younger son signed up for a computer programming class at his high school. For this he would need to be running Visual Basic to do projects and homework. So instead of trying to shove Paralells or Boot Camp onto an already packed MacBook Pro, we decided to take the plunge for a mid range Window’s Laptop. One of my Technical contacts got me set up with a Dell rep and we were off. We ended up with a more up-range machine than we originally intended, a Vostro 3400 Laptop running a Core i5 processor and Windows 7. The better machine should have a longer service life before getting overrun by software upgrades. Windows 7 widely considered a superior OS and interface, especially compared with the harsh lessons of Windows Vista. And I could use it as a test platform for the web sites I designed.
We’ve had the machine in the house for a week getting used to the wee beasite. We’re glad we got the better box. The other active laptop in the house is a Macbook Pro, about two years old, running a Core 2 Duo chip. The two machines, running side by side, other than the speed of the browsers, feel about the same in speed and responsiveness. The aluminum unibody Macbook Pro feels the stouter build, while the dell has a lot of plastic. Multitouch trackpad gestures, new to Win 7 seem to work better on the Mac. Network and Net speed is identical, more to do with our local ethernet, wi-fi and Fiber Optic connection. Flash, love it or hate it, is definitely faster in Windows seven, but the Mac OS 10.user 5 interface itself seems faster than Win 7. But that may be because we’re more used to it. The fingerprint reader is a very slick touch on the Vostro. These are all VERY subjective observations, not timed tests, but end user experience will always be subjective anyway.
One big surprise, is that Windows 7 handles user accounts very differently. In the Mac OS, when you install an application, it goes into an Applications folder, and is available to all users unless specifically blocked by an Administrator. But the situation in the Windows machine is more complex. Programs may, or may not, be available to all users. If installed by a non-admin user, only that user can even see it, much less use it. And programs installed by Admin users, may… or may not… be usable or visible to other users. Some of them are, and some aren’t. Microsoft is pretty quiet on the subject. But I have seen the issue kicked about in tech support forums by frustrated users. Apparently it depends on the developer to build the accessibility into the installer. Oh boy. There do seem to be technical fixes, but they’re VERY technical, and frankly beyond most “civilian” end users ability or patience. Especially since the effectiveness of the workarounds seems to vary.
Windows XP emulation mode is particularly a walled garden. This is required for us as Visual Studio 4, the young man’s programming environment, is an XP Software Suite not compatible with Windows 7. For XP apps to be available to individual users, they have to be installed in the XP Virtual Machine, within XP, separately for each user. I would have expected a little more flexibility in a contemporary OS, but I can at least understand that the virtual machine would need to be entirely self-contained. Thankfully, its not a big deal for our small enterprise, on one else here will likely need to program in Visual Basic.
The other thing is that Windows 7’s approach to networking is rather parochial. Win 7 just wants to talk to other Win 7 machines. The three Macs are happy to talk to anyone who’s willing to play nice with Ethernet or IP. From the Mac G5 Tower where I am writing this, I can “see” the Win7 Vostro, and log into the Admin or my Studio user, but the Vostro can’t see me. Will be looking into this. Should be a solution, as ALL the machines, including the XBox, can see the network router. This is kind of important, as our one printer is attached to this Mac, and is network visible. But I have faith in geek power. There are mighty tech talents out there.
But so far so good. These are of course quirks and quibbles, and hardly the “f**k you” platform wars of the late 90s. Thank the Gods. Having a Windows machine in a household with three working macs doesn’t make us traitors. And using Macs doesn’t make us dorks. We’re all still users, aren’t we?
If the machines get along, I’m happy. The two Steves, Jobs and Ballmer, can shout it out if they want, just let us get our work done.
Solid review of the adoption process. Integrating two such disparate cultures, Microsoft’s spaghetti bowl weirdness and the cool and logical UNIX approach found in Apple platforms is really a challenge. I gave up a long time ago and while I am a UNIX bigot, I have used the MS platform exclusively for my daily PC level work. A simple choice driven a long time ago by the needs of the business world and no real alternatives available.
I want to second your first piece of advice though. When contemplating a new device/platform select that which does your primary tasks well and the buy the heaviest iron you can afford. I have a going on 7 year old, no name PC built to my specs, running Win2k with a 3.2 Ghtz Intel processor that can handle huge spreadsheets and monster word documents without breaking a sweat. Graphics stuff, not so much, but I hardly ever do that stuff anyway. I expect another two years at least especially since I am switching to Open Office anyway.
BTW, BC started in 1962 for me.
As far as ease of administration goes, most folks don’t want to do it and given the low frequency of demand it is hard to recall what you need to do. With the UNIX based systems, including Apple’s OS(s) and Linux, you can teach anyone with a better than room temperature IQ to install new software and integrate a system into a network with appropriate permissions in a couple of hours and they will likely remember months later. It gets pretty hard to really trash the system accidentally. Windows? Not so much, to the third power.