Thread

For the last 2 years I have had Mac installed on a Dell 6400 Laptop, which previously had Vista. Mac was a great improvement to vista in speed and stability. The only feature i was was wireless which ment my laptop had to stay in one location. this factor has now become quite a large issue, so i have had to revert my laptop back to windows XP (I don’t have a Vista Disc).

I’m Seriously going to miss Mac, and until I can afford a real one I will have to live with windows, any one recommend any tools for windows, that will make my life as easy as mac?

Depending on what parts of Mac you liked, you might want to give a various flavour of Linux a try
They’re both built on a UNIX base, and Linux has just as much eye candy (you can even skin it to look just like OS X)

I did like the look of OSx, I absolutely loved the software and it’s stability. It was 10x faster than Vista was on the same laptop using only 1 core, when Vista used 2 cores. I now have XP installed with all the relevant drivers even it seems to 6 or 7x faster than Vista was, but still not as fast as Mac was.

The main reason why I haven’t tried Linux is because I use a lot of main stream software such as Dreamweaver and Office.

If you are happy with the XP install then great.

I do have to wonder what you think your time is worth and how much time have you spent un-installing Vista, installing OSX, uninstalling OSX and installing XP.

If you value your time it might have been a lot cheaper to pony up the extra money to buy a Mac laptop to start with.

I need to use XP for about four programs about once a week. So I boot up a Mac laptop into XP to do that. Otherwise I prefer to use OSX.

I had considered going the same route you did but the time involved in installing and re-installing an OS just scared me off.

I maintain 7 XP systems and 10 Mac systems and I like XP a lot-

Open office takes care of all your office needs on Linux 😊
As for DW, versions up to CS3 (inclusive) seem to run fine under wine, although you could always run a XP VM… That will probably still be much faster then Vista 😛

or, you could just dump DW (that was initially holding me back from going fully Linux, but I replaced it with Eclipse PDT)
You could always dual boot if you want

Lol, i’ll stick with XP at the moment, when i went vista to OSx that was 2 years ago, i have loved it all the way till now, when wireless if becoming needed again. without a driver for OSX for the wireless card i have had to go back to XP, i don’t mind XP, it’s much better than Vista 32Bit.

Waiting for XP to repair install, it some how corrupted it’s self on a driver install.

Update:

All installed and working again.

Waiting for XP to repair install, it some how corrupted it’s self on a driver install.

Good old windows XP 😉

Waiting for XP to repair install, it some how corrupted it’s self on a driver install.

Good old windows XP 😉

Very true, at least it’s faster and more stable than Vista.

I really don’t think that Windows XP is unstable, as Mac people tend to say (and obsess about). In my case, the only time I have ever had a problem with Windows XP crashing was when I had hardware failures, and that has nothing to do with the O/S.

I have an iMac that I got about a year ago. It is nice for some reasons, but I’m sort of tethered to my Windows box because I love Notepad++, V2 Filezilla, and I have Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. To me the iMac is a toy, and my 5 year old son has pretty much taken over control of it. It’s outstanding for parental controls.

I am typing this from my Dell Mini-9, which us running Ubuntu 8.10. If you like Mac, I think you will like Ubuntu. The core is Unix, and many terminal commands are the same. A great thing about Linux is that LAMP is extremely easy to set up, and it is going to give you an experience that is more like your development server (I’m assuming most people have Linux shared hosting accounts).

I really don’t think that Windows XP is unstable, as Mac people tend to say (and obsess about). In my case, the only time I have ever had a problem with Windows XP crashing was when I had hardware failures, and that has nothing to do with the O/S.

I have an iMac that I got about a year ago. It is nice for some reasons, but I’m sort of tethered to my Windows box because I love Notepad++, V2 Filezilla, and I have Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. To me the iMac is a toy, and my 5 year old son has pretty much taken over control of it. It’s outstanding for parental controls.

I am typing this from my Dell Mini-9, which us running Ubuntu 8.10. If you like Mac, I think you will like Ubuntu. The core is Unix, and many terminal commands are the same. A great thing about Linux is that LAMP is extremely easy to set up, and it is going to give you an experience that is more like your development server (I’m assuming most people have Linux shared hosting accounts).

Hey, yes i am a fan of mac, and i do miss it’s interface. I use ubuntu a lot as I am in the process of resetting my business up, in EC2. For which I have chosen to be the core of my network, of services. I’m also a big user of LAMP and MAMP, both of which are very simple to set-up as you have stated. thanks for your advice, and keep it coming.

I do have to wonder what you think your time is worth and how much time have you spent un-installing Vista, installing OSX, uninstalling OSX and installing XP.

You obviously don’t install OS’s very often and if you do, you must be doing it on some ancient hardware.

Vista uninstall -> delete partition (only takes a second, gonna have to have a new partition for OSX anyway)
OSX uninstall -> delete partition (same, in reverse)
XP install -> once it gets out of the DOS looking part of setup where its copying the files to the hard drive and get to the actual setup, I can be at a desktop running in like 10 minutes. Have everything set back up just like I want it in less than an hour.

Granted, that takes time, but.. it’s not like stuff like that is done on a daily basis. The only way “uninstalling” an OS should take a while is if your worried about security and are wanting to do a DoD drive wipe. I wouldnt worry about something like that unless it was a computer I was getting rid of.

Also to add to what jdfwarrior said, it’s not really lost time when you are reinatlling an OS
If you don’t have another computer you can use, I’m sure there’s something else productive you can do with an hour while it’s reinstalling your system

The only time it would be considerd a waste is if you sit infront of the PC as it installs… which I would hope/assume no one does 😉

why not get a new wireless card for your laptop? may have been answered before but i didnt read it all. even an external wireless card would work

why not get a new wireless card for your laptop? may have been answered before but i didnt read it all. even an external wireless card would work

I was thinking of replacing the internal wireless card, but in the end, I took the simple option of going back to XP, it works quite well now. I did also try and external usb wireless dongle I had lying around, but TBH the only drivers i could find for that were out dated for the OSx version on the belkin website. TBH: I have never managed to get that dongle to work on any pc or operating system.