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The new member of the family...

So here it is.  I bought a MacBook.  After literally 10+ years of being a “Dell Guy”, well Dell finally ran out of laptops that I found interesting, and my one experience with HP laptops has convinced me to never buy another one.

My last notebook, the Adamo13 was one of my favorites.  Ultra slim, solid state just about everything.  Could do a 5 hour plane-ride almost without issue.

But I needed something else.  After flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows I realized I needed something that could go both ways.  The more I thought about it, Apple seemed like the way to go.  Apple runs on a BSD Linux kernel after all, has a linux command-line (if you know where to get to it) and pretty good compatibility.

So when I finally got it in my head to upgrade, well I went ahead and dropped the hammer on a 15″ macbook pro.  (so to speak, no actual hammers were involved.)

So far I’m pretty happy with my choice.  But when the first person at work saw me on it and asked me the idiot question I got pissy.

“Are you a Mac now?”

Under breath: “No idiot, I’m a person.  I’m *USING* a Mac.”

Let me break it down.  I have in my arsenal the following systems.

In my household and business I have:

3 Desktop PC’s running windows 7
3 Laptops running Windows 7
1 Dell 1850 running Windows 2003 Server . (That despite all my kajoling, refuses to survive a P2V)

4 VMWare ESXi hosts containing the following:

11 Windows 2008 Servers
2 Windows 2003 Servers
10 CentOS 5 Servers
5 CentOS 6 Servers
2 SUSE Enterprise 11 Linux

and now

1 15″ MacBook Pro

This is the thing.  I’m a technology pragmatist.  I use what works best and does what I need it to.  In the limited scope of a transportable computer, a Mac seems to do what I need nicely, and yes, it comes in an attractive and (so far) fairly durable package.

But I’m not a Mac.  Nor am I a PC.  I’m a *PERSON* who uses a computer.  (Several actually)

Religion has no place in technology.  Leave it in the church.

Oh, and I’m still not buying a #$!@!? iPhone.

Ok, more like Day-4, but time runs away.

So far, so good.  If they manage to not screw the pooch between now and Oct 22nd, Microsoft may have almost come close to trying to redeem themselves.

I’m running Win7 on two computers now.  My laptop, which at work I’ve mostly rendered into a terminal server by implementing a very limited VDI infrastructure (different post entirely) but it gives me a chance to play.

It’s fairly quick, suspends/resumes on demand without too much belching.

I’m still annoyed that it doesn’t use all 4G of my laptops memory, but the way I understand it that’s a limitation in the hardware/chipset more than anything.  (I’m not too saavy on Intel-based limitations, so this is a guess)

Most importantly, and where Win7 excels opposed to Vista, is even in Beta, all of my usual software runs.  Right out of the box, no patches/updates needed.  I’m impressed.

Even Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 loads, complete with the ISO mounter that I’ve come to depend on.

On my desktop it screams.  My desktop is a Dual-Core 2.8G box with 4G of ram.  (Still hit the 3200Meg limit though

It discovered the quad-head setup with only minor tweaking and hasn’t lost the layout once the way Vista usually does.  (About once a week I was having to remind Vista where each monitor is in relation to the other one.  Graphics are blazingly fast but I’ve yet to test it with Call of Duty 4 or something that really exercizes the Dual 2-port 1GB PCI-e Video cards this thing runs.

The TV tuner works out of the box, and media center has some nice tweaks, including (finally) the ability to record/DVR directly to a share.  (Given that my DVR area is a Terabyte of Celerra NAS, that’s a meaningful accomplishment for me)   Using Vista I was having to script a copy from the internal drive to the share, and MediaCenter was not able to read the details once they were moved, they just became random videos.  (Despite the fact that the .dvr-ms filetype contains the metadata structures to keep the program information handy)

So all in all, not too bad.

And what’s the deal with the black&white icons in the system tray?  I would expect these as “place holders” in the early beta versions while the new icons can be developed.. but this:

Simply doesn’t make any sense.

Anyone else playing with Win7?  What are your thoughts?