sigh

I’m trying to convince work to replace my personal laptop with a MacBook Pro.

Sadly, it may be an up hill struggle.

I can cover off the compatibility side of things, I mean with bootcamp and some new VM stuff I can run Windows and make it work.

The real problem is the cost, going on recent numbers a dual core Dell with similar specs only runs to $2500, a full $1500 less than the same spec’d machine from Apple

Thats one hell of a premium to have to pay, even adding in design superiority and the OSX.

Will Apple cut prices as the dual core stuff from intel drops in cost?   Presumably only if the demand drops off for their products.

Life isn’t fair sob

Well, more than a few articles are pointing out how the new bootcamp from Apple allows the Mac to run Windows ‘flawlessly’.

Few of the articles seem to point out what occurred to me, which is…. isn’t great Windows can run on a Mac?

What I mean is, that Windows driver support is wide enough that it will run, it seems to be to be more of homage to MS than to Apple.

Its unlikely OSX would run on my Dell for instance, without a great deal of mucking around

Only this time is the rabbits turn to be taken down.

Beware scientists bearing carrots this easter… 

My other (better?) half says it all here…

Quite chuffed, fingers crossed, hope all goes well.

It’s been 5 years of waiting, so…. its about time too!

An oldie, but a goodie:

http://www.plinko.net/nevermore.htm

I always wanted to turn my 404 message into a pick-a-path (choose your own adventure) story, but I never got around to writing it.

http://www.herod.net/missing.html

I found this on lexus-nexus  which I found interesting in that is shows the process worked through in deciding if someone is a genuine refugee, the guys basic arguement was:

• I get beaten up in my home town because we worship at a temple on my family’s property and the local’s don’t like it.

The govt’s response was

• Go back to india and move towns, there is 1 billion people there and plenty of places for you to go where you won’t be picked on.

And the court appeal decided

• The govt failed to note that the guys religion is pretty much only in his town, if he moves, he won’t have access to it, go back and make a decision that accounts for this (because you haven’t in your existing decision).

The fact the guy whipped over to South Africa to watch the cricket in the middle of his persecution would tend to give credence to the fact that maybe he wasn’t as afraid as one might think….

That all said, I’m in favour of immigration, liberal refugee acceptance and the end of mandatory detention, but this guy should probably go home

These are very, very early mutterings…

Well, it finished installing during the night, I’m not sure how long it really took, but I heard it let out that happy noise computers make when restarting at some point and in the morning I had a Vista login screen to look at.

It’s driver support must be limited, the intel video card in this Vaio hasn’t been found and I’m limited to 640×480x16bit VGA.

It found the wireless card and the wireless setup stuff was much simplified - but it didn’t work :)  Fixing the wireless connection came back with a diagnostic that said the reason my wireless network didn’t work was…… no cable connnected.

Well.  Ahem… yes, I would have expected that!

Still, two unix guys couldn’t get this laptop working with wireless under debian either, so we’ll give MS the benefit of the doubt.

Other thoughts… its slow… I mean, really slow… Of course, this laptop doesn’t go anywhere near the min requirements (I should have at least 512MB Ram and a dedicated Video card), but to its credit, the laptop did ship in 2002 with XP Home installed and it was more than usable at the time.

Its hard to see ‘Aero’ in its full glory in 640×480, so I can’t comment on that.

There is some cool looking stuff under control panel, the ’search’ feature to look for the icons is good, as is a little panel that tracks where you’ve been in the control panel so you can switch back to past tasks really easily.

Windows Explorer looks ood on first flush, others have commented on the virtual folders stuff, I haven’t used it enough to comment, but it looks as though its work flow has again been ‘tweeked’

Its still Beta, its still rough around the edges… and for four, five, six years effort I’m still left wondering… where’s the beef?

*Note: This is a very ‘off the cuff’ review, based on no more than a few minutes with Vista.