I feel like I’ve taken the bluepill. All I see around me is a sham, the wool that has been pulled over my eyes.
But, ya know? It’s going okay.
A grandiose change has happened to my work environment at Chez Geek. Due to the long-running contract with ${customer}, we worked out a deal where due to the instability and possible imminent death of hunter, I was issued a new laptop. The laptop, however, runs Windows, and it was made abundantly clear by said ${customer} that they’d prefer I worked in the same environment as they do, that being, of course, Windows.
So here I am, with a spanking new laptop named ‘clipper’, and running it as my full time primary machine. After my initial revulsion at the concept, I have to concede – it’s going quite well.
I shan’t go into the details of what is different between WindowsXP and Linux. That subject has been debated, chewed on, spat up, kicked about, and shot out of a cannon plenty over the last few years. But what I’m using this machine for is exactly what Microsoft has been working on for 15+ years. A stable, high powered desktop environment that can interract with a multitide of peripherals, platforms, and hardware without very little fiddling or complaints.
Over the next few weeks I’ll talk more about some of the applications and challenges I’ve been hitting with this migration, but for now, I seem to have reached a happy detante. My view for the moment is “This is stable, it works, it does things I could not do under Linux, but I still have all the power of my Linux machines handy just a few network segments away. I can deal.”
I’m sure this will be the case until I get my first virus or malware installation, but for now, I’m a happy bluepill.
About Dave Shevett
A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.
View all posts by Dave Shevett
Well, your post gives me hope that I can find peace and happiness with a Dell D620. My story about my Dell laptop is on my blog. I still liked the old HP better. 🙂
Max
http://satelliteoffice.blogspot.com
Interesting! I’ve tried not to do the “But this isn’t LIKE my old laptop! dance as much as I can. More about embracing what’s new about this one rather than pining for what was ‘lost’. It’s a hard pill to swallow I’ll admit.
But my transition was from a Linux desktop to Windows, which can account for a LOT of the bumps.
Yah know how you rent a car at the airport and you’re used to, say, your nice little Audi A-4 and dammit, you end up with a crappy Chevy that you take an immediate hating to, so you drive it as freakin’ hard as you can, jamming it into park whenever you stop – before you stop – and revving it up before the oil pressure has had a chance to even say “wait a mi…” just because, man, you CAN? And you take it back and it looks pleadingly at you under the flourescents, saying “please, don’t leave me here, I’ll do whatever you want” and you admit a grudging, passing appreciation for stuff that doesn’t require finesse or someone named Hans to work on it and maybe flog-a-car ain’t so bad?
That’s what Windows is like.