i’ve been using mac os x for a while now and i’ve decided to make the switch back to windows. it was a harder than expected move to switch back. i love the UI of the mac. from the unified menus to the wonderful effort app developers make into making their applications easy to use, i have to say that it has been a joy to use.

so why the switch?

it was really hard for me to transition to using the mac’s keyboard shortcuts. for example, in windows, it’s control-F to fade an effect in photoshop. on the mac, it’s effectively alt-F. it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it really is.

i <3 quicksilver like you cannot believe. the closest thing i can find to it is launchy for windows, but it doesn’t come even close to quicksilver’s power.

i really like adium too and until recently, i couldn’t find anything as beautiful as it. digsby, however, adds some functionality (social networking support mainly like facebook and twitter) which makes it better than adium. on top of that, it supports the theme that i like, so the experience is very similar.

i got tired of shutdown and reboot not working.

so i decided to go with windows vista. you would imagine that after vista being around for quite a while now, they’ve worked out the kinks, and for the most part the problems that i’ve had aren’t specific so much to vista as it is to 64-bit vista.

dell isn’t making ANY 64-bit drivers for the vostro series which i think is absolutely LAME. shame on you dell for not officially supporting 64-bit vista. my main reason to go with 64-bit vista is because i put 4GB of memory into the laptop and i wanted to use all of it. 32-bit vista cannot address all of the 4GB, so 512MB goes wasted. what a waste!

most of the drivers for the laptop can be found unsupported through dell’s web page, but you have to go to some of the manufacturer’s web sites to get the drivers. what isn’t supported and what drives me nuts is that the synaptics driver doesn’t support emulation of the middle click. this means that i don’t have middle click with the touchpad! it drives me nuts! i’m gonna hope that synaptics will write drivers to support middle click, but i’m not holding my breath. i’ve already contacted dell support and they have said that the vostro series has been designed with 32-bit vista in mind and there are no plans to support the 64-bit version of vista.