Saturday I went
browsing laptops with a view to – hopefully shortly – replace the aging macbook
with something a little snappier, and possibly that I feel can be trusted more
and work better for me. PC world would not be my natural first choice, but it
was convenient and there’s a branch close by other shops that Chris was
interested to see in Banbury.
Regular readers will
know of my disaffection for Apple products and particularly OSX as a desktop
environment for working. Now while I have fairly reasonable experience of
different Linux desktops and spent many years working happily with Windows XP,
I have had almost no hands on Vista and very little with W7, so I was hoping to
catch up a little.
Worth clarifying that
with XP, when setting up immediately after installing I would automatically set
appearance to windows classic and likewise menu and toolbars, while turning off
all the auto-hide functions. This is simple THE best work environment that I
ever found. Everything is crisply laid out and accessible rapidly, text is sharp,
icons are clear, all open windows are listed in the toolbar at the bottom of
the screen and navigation is a breeze. It’s not perfect, but it is very
good, and workflow is managed easily.
Does W7 have a
‘classic windows’ setting?
So I went browsing
among the various laptops available. When did everything turn to beige and
pastel mush? I’d noticed this a little bit with a W7 computer controlling a piece
of kit last year, but didn’t really touch the windows desktop much because most
work was does using the instrument interface (also an aesthetic tram-smash, but
with the saving grace of being bold and clear). But here I found myself
squinting at screens trying to see what was going on with all the swirly
pastels and soft, indistinct colours. Restful, maybe, but it looks like the target
market is somewhere between the Daily Mail and My Little Pony magazine.
They had some Macs in
the store.
I wandered over and
looked at the iMac with it’s unevenly lit 27” screen & £1400 price tag
and shuddered a bit.
On the end I found an
11” Macbook Air. Tiny thing, glued to the counter top to prevent theft, and
of course it couldn’t be used because it was locked out, requiring a store
password to open it. A trainee assistant eventually came over, I explained why I
was there and she went off to ask the manager for the passcode. I could see her
waiting to speak to him while all the sales guys stood in a huddle chatting,
keeping her on the edge of the circle. Eventually there was enough of a gap and
back she came.
I have very mixed
feelings.
Morally speaking, I’m
pretty much at the point where boycotting Apple as a company seems ‘right’
ethically. But it’s not just that. The machine was driving a small screen, it
had an SSD hard drive with a modern processor, and yet it was
distinctly sluggish in the store. GarageBand (one of the few bits of software
on there) took about 15sec to open, and the whole system seemed lacklustre. On
the upside – and I never thought I’d say this – compared to windows systems I’d
been viewing, the desktop seemed clear and crisp, with neat grey borders and
(astonishment!) clear text.
Familiarity? Surely
not that alone.
One of the interesting
aspects of using Pear Linux is that Lion felt pretty familiar. I’d be
interested to know who copied who between Gnome and Apple, but nevermind
about that.
On the one hand I’d
like to know how it is that Microsoft can hope to keep pushing out their
muddy-looking-as-standard OS except that it is always run (sometimes badly,
though less so these days) on cheap hardware, and where people can get away
with spending £200 for a functional computer then I understand.
And on the other, I
don’t want to buy my hardware from Apple again, but all the ‘competing’ windows
machines don’t seem especially great (poor screens1366 X 768 on a premium 13" laptop - really?) and are frequently more expensive,
probably as part of the attempt to get profitability and reasonable margins
back into hardware again.
Sony have a 11” laptop
with decent spec (E11) and good screen (for the size) on the way for £400, due in about a
month, and I’ll try to get a look at that. I’m also tempted by a refurb 13.3”
macbook air because the screen is 1440 X 900, with a view to installing
windows and finally escaping OSX’s clutches, but not really happy about that for
reasons described.
Or maybe I’ll just
wait, prevaricate some more.
Does anyone know if Windows
7 has a ‘classic windows’ mode?