Vista to Mac in 24 hours, for dummies

The sweet smell of Mac pervades my flat, with just the faintest whiff of Microsoft as it lingers under the doors. I breath in, relaxed.

It took me a little less than 24 hours to realise that Windows Vista was going to be the last straw in my relationship with Bill.

I don't care to dig too deeply as to whose fault it was that I would be locked to a computer with a given operating system in another language (whether MS, ACER, Star centre, or a combination of all thre - I simply don't know)- frankly I don't care much anymore. I do however find the dead ends which Microsoft leaves for it's customers quite astounding.

My ACER came loaded with a Spanish language version of Vista, and while I'm happy to do my best in terms of integrating into a new country, I would at least like a choice in the matter. The shop assistant had assured me that I could change the language, as did the MS site:

Windows Vista Language Interface Pack (LIP).‌ Windows Vista LIPs provide a translated version of the most widely used areas of the user interface. LIPs are freely available to download, and most LIPs can be installed and used on any edition of Windows Vista. Because not all of the user interface is translated, LIPs require at least one parent language. The parts of the user interface that are not translated into the LIP language are displayed in the parent language. When you download a LIP, you get the parent language requirements for that language. The parent language pack needs to be installed before the LIP can be installed. For more information, including a list of languages available for downloading, go to the Microsoft Local Language website.

It didn't seem to be too optimistic of me to think that this meant that such an installation was in easy reach. It was quickly clear that to have a full change of language one would need an upgrade to the higher cost editions of Vista but it seemed that the LIPs were going to be a reasonable compromise. However, clicking on the above link takes you to a site advertising the unlimited potential of MS, here.

Quoting again:

Empower your community by providing it with desktop software and tools in its own language.

If you're suffering from low blood pressure I would advise you to take a short tour around the above site, which Escher would surely have been proud of. The site does indeed appear to be a worthwhile pursuit of saving local languages amongst other things. I spent roughly an hour trying to find anything that I could download in order to get the above mentioned LIP and could find nothing.

In the end I did find a tech forum where it had been noted that the promised LIPs had not been released and nobody knew when they would be. After struggling with this for some considerable time and trying to see if there was any cheap fix I gave up. Perhaps there is an easy fix on the MS site, but frankly if they want my custom then they need a little more transparency in their advertising of such things.

The horribly slow plod of Vista, even with 2Gb of ram was enough to drive me over the edge and I took back the computer within 24 hours of picking it up.

An hour later I was at home, sitting comfortably with a new, more expensive, but infinitely more pleasant looking Mac in front of me. Turning it on, I was greeted with a warm glow and a flyby of the Orion nebula as, within 2 minutes I chose my language, connected to my Wifi network, set up my accounts and preferences and opened the desktop for the first time. Somebody knows how to please their customers.

Since then it's been a breeze and I have the MacBook set up as I like it, my firefox plugins installed, TeXShop running smoothly and music gently in the background, without the accompaniment of continuous disk crunches. I may be only a lowly individual to you Mr Gates, but you've just lost yourself another customer.

Hasta la vista

My computer finally died a couple of days ago - feeling punished as it was at the time with a barrage of killing spinors.

Today I bought myself a new laptop. A Mac being a little too pricey right now I went for an Acer, the make of my last laptop and one which I'd been very happy with.

You may recall my first impressions with installing and using a Mac, which I wrote about back in November - scenes of blissful serenity as the computer started up, and then proceeded not to crash - a joy to behold.

I like to think that I'm usually a calm, and level-headed person. I tend not to swear much, simply out of habit and I like to use the logical rational I've built up as a physicist to tackle the problems of everyday life. Somehow all of this went straight out the window when faced with a mere 20 minutes of Windows Vista, which almost brought me to tears.

As I was buying the computer I was informed that my warranty was only valid if the original operating system was still present. Not overly impressed, but with the idea that if the worst came to the worst I could install XP or Linux as a second partition I turned the machine on and started to set things up.

I had also been informed that I would almost certainly be able to change the language from Spanish to English - this it turned out was simply sales pitch and unless you have the ultimate/premium editions of Vista, changing the language is damn near impossible and I'm currently struggling to configure the system, eyes wide shut, without accidentally formatting the lot (a thought which has occurred to me as a wise option on several occasions). Anyway, at the last count the 2 GB of Ram and dual processors have ground to a halt four times, for four separate reasons, and I'm wondering whether I shouldn't fork out the extra for a Mac. I'll sleep on it tonight, see if there are options to alter the language and reconsider in the morning, for now I'm a clump of hairs down and threatening to throw in the towel.

The problem with Macs

So, no sooner have I arrived in a new country, but they're trying to get me to use a new operating system. As a native XP user I was a little concerned with having to go over to Mac and my worries were well founded.

For a start, the people at the Mac shop are clearly either lazy or stupid. They came along with my computer in a box, but forgot to actually bring anything but a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Luckily there seems to be some widget in the monitor which presumably connects wirelessly to the hard drive, motherboard, CPU and memory which must still be in the shop, or even the factory, I still haven't got to the bottom of that.

Secondly, when I switch the computer on, I have absolutely no time to make a cup of tea, eat my breakfast or read the paper. I switch it on and then it's on. With XP I could clearly get a lot more done in the time between turning it on and actually being logged in.

Next, I'm horribly confused with where all my little files have gone. Normally if I want to install or uninstall something I have to make sure my dlls are all in the right place, and then make sure they've all gone when I remove the program. It seems that they've forgotten about that too. What am I going to do without a thousand files flitting around that were nominally used by a program five years ago?

Next, and most embarrassingly the user interface to Mac OS X is such that everything swirls around the screen, zooming in and out and warping to fit into the appropriate spaces so much that I occasionally find myself lost in the user interface from Minority Report, I spend several minutes waving my arms around in front of my face, one eye closed, trying to move my icons around and save my documents, while those around me in the office are trying to work out what I'm doing. Lucky most of them are on XP and so have programs to look after.

I also miss the friendly Windows task manager which I would have to pull up every hour or so to manual close a temporarily frozen program. At these points I felt I was really at one with my computer.

By the end of the evening I am left with a surplus of frowns, which would otherwise have been used up throughout day on the fascinating panoply of errors which would colour my day. This is making my nights considerably more depressing.

These things and more make me think that I will have to go back to Windows where I am safe in the knowledge that I am working with a thinking, delicate, edgy machine that I have to at all times nurture and feed. I am distraught without this bond.