Thoughts: Windows 7, Apple and DJ Hero.

Plus: Maybe its just me...

Between work and school its hard to remember that I should post something on my blog. There just isn't enough hours in the day. All in favor of 26 hour days? Anyone? Yeah, that does sound a bit nutty. I have had a good month to take everything in, and here is the short of everything. Expect a new Reswitch soon.

Windows 7

Its that time of October, where PC enthusiasts, consumers and IT staff get excited. No, were not talking about an ALCS where the Yankees and the Angels are fighting for a spot in the World Series, or a stellar NFL season. Were talking about a new version of Windows for people to enjoy. Sure, Vista wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but Windows 7 nailed it (in my humble opinion). My only concern is that it may not be as big of an event for retailers who are already looking at a bleak outlook on sales this holiday season. When your expected to sell more laptops in three months than you have the entire year, expectations are high, if not unrealistic.

Apple's New Hardware

There will always be a special place in my heart for Apple. Sure, I did have to ditch my iPhone because I wan't making enough money to support the insane amount of money it costs to keep it and I ditched OSX for Windows 7 but thats besides the point. Apple makes sexy hardware. Enter, this past Tuesday, the redesigned MacBook, the Magic Mouse and new iMacs. Was it enough to counter the onslaught of new notebooks that are hitting the market on the momentous occasion that is Windows 7? Probably not, but announcing i5 and i7 cores in the new iMac, and releasing a 27-inch iMac were great spec bumps to the already stellar lineup of all-in-one desktops. The bigger news was the new revision to the Mac Mini. More storage, more speed and a server-version of the Mini were welcomed and needed upgrades to the device most likely to disappear from the line up. The new mouse and MacBook are nice, but not as notable in my book.

 DJ Hero

I can't say enough good things about DJ Hero. Being a lover of Electronica and having already enjoyed what mashups can produce, being able to "mix" using a peripheral never sounded like so much fun. My encounters with this game, a demo at Best Buy's corporate campus and at the store that I frequent almost every day, have been nothing but fun. All I can say at this point, because I haven't been able to dive into the game at home, is that Daft Punk is represented well, and the controller will make the experienced music game player weep. Is it the 27th yet?

 Maybe Its Just Me...

...but does it make me a bad person using Apple hardware and exclusively using Windows 7 on them?

Think about it, leave me a comment.

Jake "dzdj" Geiser
 @dizzydj

Reswitch: Coming back from the Mac (part 1)

Part 1: Reasoning

There are very few things in the computing world that surprises people. One of them is switching from Windows to a Mac. Lets be honest, Vista wasn't the worst operating system in the world, but in the first few months, it was largely unusable, and Apple capitalized on that with some amazing features that Leopard offered. But Vista wasn't why I switched. I switched because I got sick and tired of having to reinstall Windows XP because of Windows-rot. I switched from Windows to OSX almost 10 years ago. 

I loved the Mac platform. 10.4 and 10.5 were good to me. January 9 came, and the Windows 7 Beta came. Coming into the beta with the mindset that it was going to be just as bad as the Longhorn/Vista betas that came before it, I was skeptical. It was at that point I realized something, this isn't going to be a repeat of Vista. In fact, this was going to be better then Vista. Coming into the beta, seeing the strides that have already been taken with things like the SuperBar, driver support and stability was astounding. All of a sudden, I wanted to use Windows again, but it was still in Beta so I didn't migrate over.

Then came the RC. When the RC was released, I started to try to use Windows for any reason. Many of my classes in school needed me to use applications that were Windows-only, so I used it a lot. More then I was using OSX. But because OSX had all of my media, and all of my iPhone software, I couldn't make that jump quite yet. It just didn't seem like I could make the jump and be happy. While the RC was going on, I was admitted into a TechNet preview, and was able to acquire Microsoft software for free. Using Office 2007 daily, coupled with Windows 7 and being able to use Google Chrome made the experience within Windows extremely pleasing. 

Then Windows 7 went RTM. Feeling that Windows 7 was going to be a solid operating system, I wanted to switch, but had to wait for Snow Leopard because it might fix a few problems I was having with OSX (sluggish Finder, it all of a sudden got slow on boot and some apps randomly quit working). Those issues were why I started using Windows 7 more the OSX in the first place. I finally decided to make the jump, before Snow Leopard. I didn't want to wait any more. So I backed everything up, and used Boot Camp to make OSX a mere 15GB so Windows 7 could have the other 465GB.

I made the switch almost 2 months ago. I haven't wanted to switch back to OSX since. Over the next couple weeks, I will be blogging about my switch, or reswitch to Windows 7. Sure, you may be asking, Why didn't you switch to Snow Leopard? I did and had some major problems with it. I was becoming more and more unhappy with OSX as time went on. It was time for me to revisit Windows, and Windows 7 impressed me more and more as I used it. We'll touch on that more as this series goes on!