Lost!

I’ve been a solid Windows user since ver. 3 (yes, that clunky windows version that everyone laughs at). Before then, I was a solid, hard core, DOS user. Over the years, I’ve used FreeBSD, Digital Unix, several Flavors of Linux, and all the Apple OS’ from 7.1 to X… This month, I made a major decision to completely switch to Mac, even though I do .Net dabbling, SharePoint work and all that Windows based stuff.

No, contrary to what my wife believes, I have not lost my mind. In fact, I’m fed up with the Windows world. At this point, I’ll be using a Macbook Pro for my work. I’ll be dumping my 17 inch Toshiba gaming rig because it’s too heavy, too big, too loud, and doesn’t have enough battery life to do anything but barely watch a DVD. Thats right folks, I “downgraded” to something faster, better looking, much less heavier and has about….oh, 3 or so hours more of battery life.

Over the last month, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with Vista. I’m tired of the weird tweaks you have to perform out of the box, like turning off the Optional Driver updates that seem to fry anything thats updated. Or the fact that half the programs that run inside Windows need Admin permissions (so - do we blame this on the devs or MSFT???) or else they either don’t work, freak out or crash everything. Even Visual Studio is recommended to be run as Admin for gods sake. So, due to that and the whole disliking the overly huge chunk of a laptop I have, I decided to look for something better. At first, I was gunning for a Voodoo Envy, but found out that it completely lacked the horsepower that I needed (I all-out require 4+ gigs of memory) and I’d have to deal with Windows or some flavor of Linux that I hoped I could find drivers for. Then, I rememberd my good friend, FreeBSD and the stars aligned. Mac OS X is based off FreeBSD…

In the past, I shied away from Macs due to their pricing and their OS. When OS 9 came out, things got interesting. OS X (10) came out and things where much better, but the first few versions really needed some ironing out. Then, once it became a solid OS, there wasn’t any way to really run Windows on it. Then things finally ironed themselves out when Apple announced that they’d switch to Intel based CPUs. That made it even easier to switch. Finally, over the last 2 or so years, everything came to a head. Now, Parallels and VMWare Fusion are two rock-solid platforms to run windows in full Virtual Machine mode. I could have partitioned windows on the mac, but know of several heat issues that Windows Causes and my mind works too fast to wait for a restart into Windows…

With that said, I’ve had my mac for 48 hours now and I’m loving it. The keyboard is nice, the screen is great and it boots up faster than anything I’ve seen in a very long time. Try getting into Windows and being fully usable in 20 seconds… Ain’t gonna happen, no matter how hard you try. The other thing is, I’ll be switching my home Dev and Research environment to XP or Vista (I haven’t officially decided) inside VMWare Fusion since I can doc IE and Visual Studio to work on things when I want. It’s nice not to need to get into Windows just to check some code or goof off a little. Yes, I know this means running the machine a lot, but thats fine. My other option is to keep my old laptop just for dev work, but for now, that isn’t going to happen unless I find something horribly wrong with the whole .Net on a Mac…

So far, the only weird thing I’ve found is that I have a DNS issue to iron out. Aparently Vista has fixed this for me, but my Mac has issues resolving my internal web server address even though it can see it in Finder (Think Explorer on Windows). Oddly, SharePoint looks perfectly fine in Safari ;-)

Preview of the Next Blog Post: MSFT Virtual Server 2005:
Now that I have a full blown server at home, I needed a way to use it for several purposes. There where two options:

Between those two options, I’ve done the first, not fun. The second was the only way to go. The hard part about that option was, which software to install.