Once you go Mac, you never go back!

Having a powerful laptop, for me, is essential.  And it has to be reliable too.

My Dell XPS Gen2 that I bought back in August 2005 was the most smoking-hot laptop on the market at the time I got her, bless her little heart, and she did me well for about 3.7 years, more than half a year beyond her 3-year full-deal complete package warranty ran out.  The only thing wrong with it is the IDE hard drive started going bad and I can only run it in safe mode now and virtually every application I try to launch tells me I have to re-install it.  Still, even with it’s single core cpu, it’s still probably as fast as many of the laptops in the Philippines that sell for PHP 25,000 to 35,000.  Once I find a replacement hard drive for it, I will pass it on to someone else.  It was and still is one cool laptop, and it probably still has a good 3 more years left in it.  (I know of some people that are still using Pentium II’s, like 400 and 600 mhz models.)

However, I am beginning to get used to my new MacBook Pro and she is turning out to be suprisingly cool.  She’s got the same footprint size as my XPS, but she’s more than 1/2 inch slimmer and about half the weight.

I was running this baby in dual-boot mode, where I had Windows XP (SP3) running on a separate partition, but it was bothering me that I could not suspend or hibernate XP and then boot into the Mac OS and try to learn how to use it.  I would have to totally shut down Windows to boot into the Mac OS.

So, I have this one client who has always used a Mac and as soon as I saw her ICQ ID come online I hit her up, asking her how was I ever going to learn the Mac OS and the software it runs, if I am always running XP, and I also asked her, without stopping to catch my breath, how did she run some of the SEO tools that are only made for Windows machines.

“Parallels”, she tell me.

So, I check it out, Parallels and I am impressed.  I tried VMware a few years ago and was not able to make good use of it, and while they have improved a lot since then, in comparing them to Parallels, well, VMware is in 2nd place.

I didn’t know much about how to install it, so I just followed the instructions, thinking I would have to do a complete re-install of my XP Pro, but lo and behold, Parallels just went ahead and found my XP installation and integrated it.  Now I’m running XP as a virtual machine while booted into the Apple OS.

I can also install Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Linux.  I have not been impressed with Vista, although I have it running on a couple of desktops in my house (for other people to use), I am seriously thinking of buying a legitimate copy and trying it out.  After all, I do run a high-tech company and many clients and clients’s clients and their users as well use Vista, so I should probably at least get more familiar with it than I already am.  That kind of falls under my job description

Right now I am downloading the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04, a free Linux distribution, which I intend to install.  Ubuntu will fit on a CD, it is less than 700 MB, however, they say you need 4 GB of free space to install it.

And I am also downloading the 64-bit version of Windows 7, which is 3 GB.  It will take me days to download that.

The nice thing about all this is that I could run all these OS’s at the same time running Parallels in the Mac OS.

I have installed several versions of Linux over the past few years (not in the last 3 years) and I just could never quite get the hang of it.  There was always some need to run some command line to get some software or device driver installed, and while I can still run some DOS command  lines (thanks Mom for helping me in those early days), I just never got the hang of it in Linux, and I don’t want to.

Oh, and I heard Windows 7 (final) will be out before the end of October.  Yeah, this year.  That’s 5 months from now.  And it is supposed to be EXPENSIVE.

The World economy is tanking and is not expected to recover for years.  Windows 7 is the best thing on the “Windows” horizon, but no one is going to be able to afford it.  That’s one good reason to try a Mac and to try Linux.

So, I have a 320 GB hard drive on this Mac:
Mac OS X
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Ubunto Linux

I am going to have to run multiple partitions.  Windows will only boot if it is one of the first three partitions, so I am wondering if Parallels will be able to handle that, since I’ll have 5 OS’s running on this machine at the same time.

The only OS that will be 32-bit will be my XP Pro installation.  Oh, and I have had to re-activate my XP Pro three times now since instaling it on the Mac.  Once it went through online, no problem.  The 2nd two times I had to do it via the telephone, talking to a freaking robot.

I simply can hardly stand the wait to get a 8-core CPU running at 3.2 Ghz (or higher) with a pair of terabyte hard drives running in a RAID 0 stripe.  Maybe by Christmas 2010 I’ll be able to buy a Mac with those specs.

Now, am I the coolest guy you ever met?  That you’ve yet to meet?  That you’ve never met?  That you want to meet?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 01:22 and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.