Skip to main content

Back to Windows

I joined Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, and after 15 years of only using Macs and OS X for my work and personal computers, I traded both for their Windows equivalent.


For my laptop, I got a Lenovo X1 Carbon that is growing on me. It reminds me of my Mac Book Air: it is very light, with a great design, and an excellent battery life—with a ton of applications running, I usually get 6 or 7 hours of battery life. And the icing on the cake is the touch screen, and the great tactile feel ThinkPad keyboards are well known for.


The laptop had Windows 8.1 on it, but since I have access to any Windows build, I decided to image it with a prebuild of Windows 10. After a couple of weeks of usage, I can safely say I like Windows 10. It has definitely come a long way since the last time I used it 15 years ago. 


For one, hibernation and wakeup are much faster now, and file operations—which I remember were slow and infuriating, are now acceptable. I also like Cortana, and the new Edge browser. But what I am enjoying the most is the 1st class platform support for all drivers and applications I can think of. Connecting my old and aging printer was no longer a painful process, and using the newest Logitech wireless headphones was a breeze.


There are a couple of things I miss about my Mac, but they are both minor. One is the native Unix environment, but Cygwin and Cygwin-X are a good substitute. Also running Linux under Hyper-V is a good alternative. The second is swapping the Caps Lock and Control keys—which makes using Emacs a lot easier. On OSX it is an easy task through the keyboard settings, while on Windows I recall it is a convoluted editing of a registry key.


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why good customer service matters?

I am not an Apple fan, but I do like their computers, and recommend them to colleagues and friends for a variety of reasons. They are well designed, and in addition to an excellent user interface, they run a flavor of Unix--which makes the life of computer programmers a lot easier. But most importantly, Apple's customer support is impeccable, that despite all the hardware issues I experienced in the past, I still recommend Apple computers. Let me explain why. A year and a half ago, I bought a Mac Book Pro for work. At the time it was the first generation unibody laptop, that had an i7 processor, lots of memory, and lots of disk space. Alas, like first generation models everywhere, it also had a lot of hardware problems. The most annoying of which was the screen randomly turning dark, with the hard drive spinning out of control. The only way to get out of this state was by forcing a reboot by holding down the power button, and losing everything I have been working on. At first
2 comments
Read more

Kindle Paperwhite

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks. I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely. The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof.   The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot. At home I have struggled to put it down. The books
2 comments
Read more

New ASUS RT-AX88U router

  I have been using Asus routers for many years, and have been pretty happy with them. The web interface is superb, and the firmware upgrades are timely and easy to apply, and over the last couple of years have introduced newer features that kept my old router relevant and functional.   After many years of service, my older router finally gave way, and started dropping Wifi connections randomly, especially when under heavy load. The connection drop happens whenever the kids have a Zoom meeting, or my wife and I are on work calls. Turning the laptop/iPad Wifi off and on again did not help, and we usually had to reboot the router to be able to connect again. Out of curiosity I looked at the CPU/memory stats of the router under heavy load, and could not see any issues. Even when all of us were in video calls, the CPU/memory did not rise about 50%. I could not see anything abnormal in the logs either. Online I saw that a lot of people had similar problems after upgrading to the latest rout
Post a Comment
Read more