Dec
12
A hardware and software upgrade for This Blog
By
This Blog has undergone an upgrade of both hardware and software in the last couple of months.
"Data capture" is now done with a Lenovo ThinkPad X301. Faithful readers will know that I suffered the temptation of converting to Apple. The Airbook was the only machine light enough for my purposes. But it turns out that the X301 has the 128 GB SSD that I believe Airbook still lacks. Plus it has lots of ports and functionality Apple couldn't manage to stuff into the Airbook. For those looking for a light machine, I cannot recommend this machine highly enough.
I stayed with Windows XP but I did upgrade to the Microsoft Office Suite 2007. I am not a fan of Microsoft software, hence my thoughts of defection, but I have to say that Word 2007 is fantastically better than its predecessor. I am working on a manuscript and the "Document map" so buggy and unreliable in the old Word, now works superbly well and allows me to teleport easily from one part of the other. Sad to say, Microsoft's blogging option remains frustrating, but for these purposes there's always TypePad.
Best of luck Grant! When my Vaio recently died I made the move to Apple. The experience has far surpassed everything I’ve come to expect with a PC and Microsoft. I’ll never go back.
MacBook Pro. End of story.
i’ve been a mac guy for ever. I shifted from a MacBook Pro to the Air several months ago and am delighted.
prepare yourself for mac love. it’s been shown that apple owners are far less likely to allow others to touch or use their macs. i’d be curious to hear how your interaction shifts. . . . .
I’ve never used Windows Live Writer but it gets a good write-up from Lifehacker today, in case it’s not on your radar: http://is.gd/bY7G
I went the OS X route and can’t imagine going back. My field doesn’t use Office (it is incredibly lame for typesetting equations) and most of us had Unix backgrounds so we’re probably 80%+ OS X these days.
About 90% of my writing is done with very simple and simple tools like Pages and the totally amazing Scrivener supports that. The rest of the work is in LaTeX. Maple, Mathematica and my own code are my other primary tools and support in OS X is very good. A real surprise was Papers – probably the best tool I’ve seen for organizing scientific papers.
We all have different needs. A friend who is bound to Windows by his company just bought a new laptop and had to pay the downgrade premium to get XP. I haven’t found many who are wildly enthusiastic about Vista…
I’m working on a book aimed at a general audience and my co-author just got a new MacBook. She is very happy and reports about two days to become very comfortable.
Being on the same platform is a plus be it Windows or OS X.
I second the recommend of Windows Live Writer…