Well. I'm having a crisis of faith. Looking at going back to the dark side. Windows 7 Home Premium, 3 user pack for ~$210 depending on where you shop. With the Release Candidate soon to expire in the next few months on the wife's PC, I have to either put XP back on it, or move to Windows 7. The 3 user pack is a good deal, normally it's about $160 for a single user, but it is going to be very short-lived. It only ran a couple of months even in the USA. There's a sense of urgency to this.
My wife couldn't care less what OS is running (as long as it's windows), so there'd be no problems with putting XP on, in her view. Realistically, I just need to get a decent backup program for it, because the Win7RC one is pretty good, while the standard XP one is rubbish by comparison. The only issue with the RC is while it is scheduled to run every Saturday at 3am, it seems to insist that the next scheduled time is December 30, 1899. Back in the days of steam-powered computers. I assume it is fixed in the release version of Windows 7.
Over the last few days and weeks, running linux has started to wear me down a bit. It is such a battle sometimes, to do stuff that would be simple in Windows or even OSX. Yesterday I wanted to install Google SketchUp – no native linux client, so installed through Wine. Go to run it, crashes straight away. Then it's off trawling forums and web searching for fixes, workarounds, all of that. Then there's flash player. Still buggy, still get sound lagging behind so speaking is out of sync. There's always more work, a lot of the time. F-Spot is a piece of crap, crashing all the time. Picasa is a half-arsed effort, just a windows program running under wine, really. Just doesn't look right.
But still, there are aspects of linux that I love. MythTV is the killer app, in my opinion. There is nothing in the proprietary software world that is so capable and unrestricted, with nothing locked down by media companies. I would miss that the most if I went back to windows. Being able to scroll anywhere without first clicking in the window is something I wish windows had, when I'm using it at work.
Anyway, I'll keep thinking about it, and pick it up on boxing day if I decide to. Otherwise, I could put that money towards hardware. I need a new screen, which I'll get regardless, but that $200 could go towards a solid state hard drive. Mmmm, fast.
(Originally posted December 25, 2009 on my other blog)
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