hello, i'm a mac, and i'm also a "pc"

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My Lenovo T60P laptop crashed last week. I don't know what caused it. It wasn't the hard-disk, it wasn't the RAM. No idea what did it in. This computer had been working like a charm for over a year, and it has traveled over 5787691 miles with me. So after it crashed en route to Hilton Head, South Carolina last week, I was computer-less. It actually worked out not having a computer in a beachy-resort for a week. But once I got back home, the lack of a computer started to get to me. I felt like I was missing a limb or my first-born child.

So I turned to my MacBook Pro (I'd bought one a few months back). I'd heard people rave about Parallels, but I hadn't really tested it out. I'd heard about Boot Camp, and hadn't tried that out either. But now was the time. Because I'd been "pc-less" for a while, I had lots of "work" to catch up on (my boss reads my blog) . So I upgraded to Boot Camp 1.2 Beta, and installed Vista on my MacBook, not really knowing what to expect. And let me tell you, I was happy elated ecstatic.

  1. The Boot Camp experience - upgrading to Boot Camp 1.2, installing Vista etc. was amazingly seamless. It took me less than 30 minutes to get Vista installed on a new partition on my MacBook. Boot Camp 1.2 Vista on MacBook Pro
  2. The Vista experience on my MacBook - one word - brilliant. My Lenovo has never performed the way my MacBook was performing with Vista on it. It was as if the Mac was customized for Vista (how weird does that sound?) The constant hard-disk thrashing that I used to notice on my Lenovo was not there. The CPU usage is constantly low-ish. Memory usage (I have 2GBs on my MacBook) has always been consistent. As you can see in the image on the right, my Windows Experience Index was a 4.6 - not bad at all. Granted I don't have a lot of applications installed just yet, but you know, I have all the usual suspects - Office 2007, Visual Studio 2005, Expression *, Live Meeting, Firefox, Virtual PC 2007, Solitaire, Last.fm. The only thing I haven't tested yet is running a Virtual Machine in it.
  3. Double-finger wha?  I switch back and forth between Vista and the MacOS quite a bit now, and I occasionally do things like trying to right-mouse click in MacOS or trying to use Exposé in Vista. One of my favoritestest features in MacOS is, that's right, the double-finger scrolling. You can imagine my surprise when I accidentally tried to double-finger scroll using the trackpad on my MacBook in Vista, and it worked. It just works*. A tear rolled down my cheek.
  4. Apple Remote - My Apple Remote lets me control Windows Media Player on Vista. Believe that. At first I was afraid, and now I am petrified.

Thank you, Apple. I've never been able to identify with either the Mac guy or the PC guy in your commercials. I can't say that I can identify with either of them now, but I feel good.

And, guess what, my personal computer, ironically, is not a "PC". Or is it?

Now playing in my head : "Wake me up when September Ends", by Green Day

"ai"
* - Head over to Google, type in "it just works", and hit the "I'm getting lucky" button. See what you see.

Technorati tags: lenovo, t60p, hilton head, boot camp, macbook pro, vista, office 2007, visual studio, expression, live meeting, firefox, virtual pc 2007, last.fm, exposé, two finger scrolling, apple remote, isight, green day, mac guy, pc guy, mac os x, windows experience index