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!