RicDay on Publishing

I am finally Windows free, and I am happier for it. I have had a rocky relationship with Redmond’s products stretching all the way back to the first commercial version of DOS on an IBM clone box: MS-DOS 1.0, bought in 1982, which was really a Tim Paterson’s clone of CP/M with some smudged lipstick.

About 18 months ago I built myself yet another new Windows desktop: quad-core, tons of RAM, 960GB internal storage, 9800 GTX+ video card driving a pair of large monitors and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (legal and licensed). I'm not especially interested in gaming; the machine was my workstation for writing, software coding, and some graphics tasks. It worked well. For a while.

The machine began playing up, crashing frequently, early this year. So I stripped it down and tested the hardware, which was fine. The machine was behind a couple of layers of firewall, decent antivirus software was up-to-date, the machine was isolated from others on the internal network, and not normally run with administrator permissions, so malware seemed unlikely. I ran a sniffer on the ethernet line “just in case” but there was no untoward activity.

Everything pointed to that old chestnut: the Windows Registry. The way to solve the crashes would be to try running Windows Repair (which in my experience rarely works), then “do it right” by reinstalling on a clean hard drive.

Insight

Sometime in March, I was lying in bed thinking about a reinstall and a lightbulb went on: I’ve been doing this ever since Windows 95 was launched. Windows seems to develop digital dry rot in its foundations pretty quickly. After you have used a machine reasonably heavily for a couple of years, you need to either replace it or do a clean reinstall. I have been doing one or the other for 15 years.

Then I thought about my other computers. I don’t think my Ubuntu desktop has ever crashed in the four or five years it has been running. I update the OS once in a while and stay more or less current with patches. It does not run any slower than it did the day I assembled it.

My MacBook Pro laptop is a couple of years old. I’ve managed to freeze an application a few times, usually while testing code, and have always been able to force the application to quit and then restart it without a reboot. It, too, runs as quick as it did the day I took it out of the box.

I waited until Apple refreshed their iMac line, then ordered a build-to-order 27-inch model with a few bells and whistles for my home office. At my business office I replaced an XP box with a Mac mini.

Changes

The biggest change is, I am now using my computers and not spending stupid amounts of time fixing OS problems. I use LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets, exporting to .doc or .xls for staff who need that. The other software packages I use heavily are oXygen, Coda, BBEdit, and Transmit. I used oXygen on Windows so that switch was painless. Transmit is a delight and better than the FTP software I was using on Windows. I like both BBEdit and Coda but am still learning the subtleties of both. I have a feeling I’ll keep using both, switching to and fro depending on the project. I have not settled on a graphics package yet; haven't needed to, but have started testing Pixelmator; I can always fall back on GIMP on the Ubuntu box.

Overall, I am happy I made the change. Probably should have done it a few years ago. I never loved Windows; I just tolerated it, so please don’t take this as a fanboi’s conversion. Windows (as opposed to early MS-DOS) has always felt like it was designed by a committee and built by people for whom “okay” was good enough, with interface “decoration” done by an ever-changing group of pimply new hires who ensured the interface remained consistently inconsistent from one release the the next.