One of my biggest frustrations with Vista, at least initially on my 2-year-old desktop, was the incessant disk thrashing. The computer sits in the corner of our living room (it’s a small condo, so it’s basically all living room…), and the hard drive is not exactly quiet while under load. Every night, after about five minutes of idle time, the disk would grind away endlessly for hours at a time. I have a ton of mp3s and videos, so I assumed that eventually Vista would index everything and it would settle down. It never did, so I went on an adventure of shutting down every possible service to see what was causing the disk thrashing.

Eventually, I found it. If you’re suffering this problem, change the frequency of index updates and it should settle down:

• Open “Power Options”
• Click “Change plan settings” for your currently selected power plan (if I try really hard, I can almost imagine why this is under Power Settings. Almost.)
• Click “Change advanced power settings”
• Find “Searching and Indexing”, then “Power Savings Mode” in the tree
• Change the setting to “Balanced”

Well, after three months of disk thrashing and obscenely poor performance, I’m going back to XP on my desktop. Vista has some niceties, but on that machine (only 1GB of RAM) it was just too painfully slow to use, especially with two accounts logged in at the same time.

Windows Explorer keeps frustrating me as well. Switching directories takes 10-12 seconds while it refreshes it’s thumbnail cache, and the “smart” columns wants to treat every directory as if it were full of MP3s (thanks, but I really don’t need to see the Artist and Rating associated with my ZIP files).

The change, for me, is actually much bigger than that: I’ve quit my job, and joined a startup in the online money transfer arena. This is the project I’ve always wanted. A small, focused team of great people, and the chance to work on something I can truly call my own. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that good stuff. I’ll be the sole UI dude, designer and implementer of wondrous interfaces for the website and administration tool. To accomplish this, I’ve made the big switch — I bought a Mac. MacBook Pro, to be precise.

I’ll post more in the future about my experience with the Mac, but if my initial impressions hold, it’s everything I dreamed it could be, and certainly everything Vista is not.

Some shorties:

• Expose: Wow. Completely changed my workflow. I love it
• Font Rendering: I never had a problem with Windows’ font rendering. Now I do.
• It Just Works: for the most part, it actually does just work
• Home/End keys: come on, Apple… really. I hit the Home key probably 300 times a day, and I’ve never, ever wanted the behaviour Mac’s use by default. Thankfully, there are workarounds for this
• Uptime: I’ve had it for a week, and I still haven’t rebooted it. Ever.

After I first installed Windows Vista, I attempted to use the default application (whenever possible) for activities which I usually installed some kind of helper app. For example, I initially toyed with Media Player instead of installing Winamp, and use the included photo manager instead of grabbing Photoshop Album.

In the process of installing my iPod software, I also decided to give iTunes a whirl. I have never actually used iTunes — it’s always been completely at odd with my expectations from music management software. The few times I played with it, it was baffling. I didn’t quite understand it’s legendary status as the most usable media player available. It was also huge. Read the rest of this post… »