It's been a couple of weeks since I reported on Project Switchback, my experiment in using an ASUS UL30A-X5 thin-and-light notebook as my primary computer after a long period in which I was more Mac person than Windows person. How are things going? Pretty well.
The Asus has continued to perform well--it's the best $675 investment I've ever made in a computer. I do, however, struggle to eke out half of its advertised twelve-hour battery life. And I did discover a display glitch: Sometimes, the machine refuses to render bitmapped images, such as PowerPoint thumbnails. (It's been a minor enough irritant that I haven't found time to troubleshoot it, although I'm now downloading the latest graphics driver just in case.)
Other than that graphics weirdness, Windows 7 has been running like a champ. It's the same pleasing OS I'd been running in pre-release form for a year, and I haven't run into any compatibility problems, or suffered any crashes.
I like being able to use a shipping version of Chrome as my primary browser. I like being able to run Office 2007 without having to resort to virtualization. Mostly, I like the fact that the OS sort of recedes into the background. I forget whether I'm using Windows or OS X-and I mean that as a compliment. (I'd much rather focus on the work or fun at hand than think much about what operating system I'm using.)
Speaking of OS X, I still like it better than Windows overall, although the gap has narrowed a lot from the days of the Vista-Leopard race. Snow Leopard remains sleeker, more subdued, and more consistent than Windows 7: It's even easier to ignore. A few remaining Windows 7 irritants (none of them catastrophic) that have no counterpart in OS X:
You don't always get a search field in Windows 7 file open dialog boxes. On Macs, I hardly ever navigate to a file or folder-I just use Spotlight to find it. Windows dialogs are more cluttered and less consistent, and you can't assume they'll have a nice big search field in the upper right-hand corner.
The Windows 7 Taskbar is stubborn. By which I mean that even if you choose the Auto-Hide feature, it sometimes won't budge. This baffled me until I figured out that if an app in the Taskbar is trying to alert you to something, the Taskbar won't hide itself. It's annoying-both because I always want the Taskbar hidden, and because it isn't always obvious that an app is attempting to tell you something. I want an "Always, Always Autohide" feature.
(Note: This may be a Taskbar annoyance of long standing, not a new Windows 7 one. I can't remember. But it sticks out, since it's at odds with Windows 7's generally more compliant personality.)
Windows 7 doesn't always grind things down to the minimum number of clicks. In its Wi-Fi finder, for instance, you've got to click twice to connect to a wireless network: Once to select it, then again to connect-and you'll probably need to move the mouse pointer in between clicks to hover it over the Connect button. On a Mac, it's a one-click process.
(Another note: It's conceivable that Microsoft inserted the extra click on purpose, to reduce the chance you'll accidentally connect to a network and not notice it. But in general, Windows 7 still feels less like a lean, mean machine than OS X.)
I quibble, but I remain a Windows 7 fan. I haven't been as pleased with a new Microsoft OS since Windows 2000 came along a decade ago. (To me, both XP and Vista were disappointments-Microsoft spent too much time on unnecessary eye candy, and too little time fixing glaring problems that made using Windows less than pleasant.)
More thoughts on Windows 7 as I continue Project Switchback. At some point, I'll declare the experiment to be over; I'm still not sure if I'll segue back to my MacBook Pro as my main machine, or stick with the Asus. Basically, I like ‘em both.
If you've got thoughts on Windows 7, please share them-preferably by taking our Windows 7 Satisfaction Survey...
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