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Windows 7 vs OS X Leopard for Netbook

Published on May 21, 2009 in mac. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

macvswin

I recently got very brave and decided to try out Windows 7 on my Lenovo S10 netbook since I had heard so many different sources speak highly of the new Windows Release Candidate.

Initially I wanted to try and dual boot and keep my existing OSX installation fresh.  So I used Disk Utility to shrink the Mac partition and make room for the new Windows OS.  This was a failure.  Even thought Win 7 is supposed to be able to deal with the GUID partition tables I just couldn’t cram the thing down the throat of the install.  So knowing that I have my Time Machine backup handy I decided to just say screw it and blow the whole thing away.

Once I made this leap the Windows 7 install was a piece of cake.  Very little input was needed from me to do the install and it didn’t even take that long.  After the first reboot pretty much everything on the system worked right out of the box.  Video, Webcam, Audio, Mic, Wifi, Ethernet, Card Reader, Sleep, you name it, it worked.  Install, thumbs up!

Next up I got the business of getting the system ready for real use.  This meant finding a browser I enjoyed and getting Lightroom rolling.  I found that the IE8 was pretty awesome!  The full screen mode is unbeatable on the resolution limited netbook.  It’s completely fullscreen with an autohiding address bar, tabs, and bookmarks.  Top notch!  Lightroom installed just fine.  The big issue here was that I could not get it to properly import photos.  The other big issue was that overall performance just couldn’t touch Mac OS X.  Expose and Spaces completely dominates the Windows Aero switcher.  Both in usability and in animation smoothness.  iTunes also performed much better in OS X.  Finally I would say that overall multi-tasking performance in OS X was considerably better.

So in the end Windows 7 didn’t last long.  Next post I’ll discuss the switch back to Mac OS X.  There are some new tools and twists since I last did this and the process is now even smoother!

Two Months of Mac Netbook

Published on May 5, 2009 in mac. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’ve been thinking a lot about life with my Lenovo S10 hackintosh netbook as my only system. Recent articles in Lifehacker, TUAW, and Wired got me thinking about it even more.  Most of these folks are going on about 6 months with their Hackintosh netbooks, I’m at two months.  That said I have definitely formed some opinions about the whole thing.  Some good, some bad.  I’ve even been contimplating the purchase of a full Mac Laptop as a replacement.

What it has been really great for is having a fully functioning laptop I can drag around with me anywhere I want in my Tenba bag along with all my camera gear.  I don’t even have to bring the power supply along for a day trip since I invested in a 9 cell battery for it from ebay for 75 bucks.  This is a pretty unstoppable combination for day travel.  I am getting between 7 and 10 hours of battery life in this setup.  Not bad for a little netbook and a cheap knockoff battery.  I also added a Logitech Nano VX mouse to use along with the system as well.  It’s a great match since I can leave the micro reciever in the netbook at all times, very convenient.  I’m also using the netbook hooked up to my 20″ LCD display when at home sometimes.  This is a great setup when I want to do heavy photo editing or work from home.

Overall system performance is OK.  It’s tolerable basically.  It runs Lightroom fine if I am willing to be a little bit patient with it.  I don’t do a lot of brushwork and cloning so that definitely helps, these functions are a bit slower for real artistic work.  I would guess Photoshop would be nearly unusable if I were to try.  It’s great for web browsing with the Safari 4 beta which saves me some screen real estate.  Watching video is a crusher.  It can handle 480p h.264 video and lower quality flash video, but no more.  With 2 gigs of memory it handles multitasking just fine.  I keep Adium, iTunes, and Tweetie open at all times along with a few browser tabs and Lightroom and switching is fine, no issues there.  I have even set up XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.  I would say that compared to netbooks running XP performance is actually better, especially for multi-tasking.

Ergonomics is another issue all together.   The keyboard was my main concern initially but this turned out to be almost a non issue.  They layout of the Lenovo S10 keyboard is fine for all but the most intense typing.  The touchpad is worthless for anything but the most basic navigation, thus the cordless mouse.  The screen has also turned out to be a bit of an issue.  At 1024×600 it doesn’t have enough vertical resolution for a lot of apps.  I have to use some scaling trickery to make these work.  Overall, a higher res screen sure would be nice.  I’ve even gone in search of the panel from a Dell Mini 10 “HD” which is 1200×768 or so to see if I could hack it in somehow.  No luck yet.

So in the end it’s still a usable solution.  I think I would really like a real mac though.  The extra screen real estate and the added horsepower would be really great.  Not sure how I feel about giving up the insane battery life that I get right now or the compact size.  There is also the cost.  I’m not limited with what I can do with the Lenovo right now, so I think I’ll just stick with it.