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.