As a nice, juicy little carrot to inspire me to finish writing MultiReal, I’ve decided that I’m going to finally buy a new laptop once I’m done. So the question is: which one?
My existing Toshiba Satellite 2435-S255 has served me well since 2003, but now it’s showing its age. I banged the left corner at some point, making it difficult to open and close the display. About 33% of the time, the laptop doesn’t wake up from hibernation properly, and I have to shut the whole thing down and reboot (losing whatever I hadn’t previously saved). No matter how careful I’ve been, the keyboard is carpeted with crumbs from a million Starbucks muffins and the screen is a little splotchy. The battery life is down to about 45 minutes — which is generally fine, because I almost always use a power outlet.
So now here’s the big question: should I buy a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, or a Linux laptop? And what brand?
Here are the primary things I’m looking for:
- A nice big, clear screen
- Just enough horsepower to run office applications, but not totally choke when I try to crank up Photoshop
- Light weight
- Good battery life
- If I choose a Windows laptop, it’s got to be Windows Vista and Office 2007 ready, in case I decide to upgrade
- Cooooool look and feel
As you can see, this doesn’t have to be a real powerhouse of a machine. It’s mainly going to be used for word processing, Net surfing, and the occasional light web programming/Photoshopping. I won’t be playing Quake 4 on it, and I won’t be storing my music collection on it — that’s what the desktop’s for. I do keep multimedia reference materials on my laptop (e.g. Encarta), but nothing that’s gonna really smoke up the microprocessor.
I’m leaning towards sticking with Windows, for all of the standard reasons. It’s familiar and I already own all the software I need to run. You can find Windows laptops all over the price spectrum too, from bargain basement to luxury. And despite what everyone says, Windows XP is quite a stable and secure operating system if you know what you’re doing. (Turn that Remote Registry off, people.)
But I’m certainly open to switching to Mac. I’ve admired many a MacBook Pro from afar, and they definitely meet the coooooolness test. Macs are also reputed to have that “it just works” quality that Windows sometimes has, given the right hardware and phase of the moon.
Yet there are always the standard caveats to switching to Mac: it’s much more expensive, I’ll need to rebuy all of my software, and I simply don’t know all the cool OS tricks like I do with Windows. How do you boot one of those suckers in Safe Mode? Is there such a thing? What’s the keyboard combination to call up the Task Manager (or Mac equivalent) to kill frozen programs? Is my Firefox Google Browser Sync gonna work?
As for Linux, I’ve heard plenty that Ubuntu is a professional-class operating system that rivals Windows or Mac in usability and stability, while eating their lunch in price point and configurability. But the learning curve for switching to Linux is much steeper than switching to Mac, and nobody’s ever convinced me that it’s worth the effort. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I’m skeptical.
Here’s the bottom line, folks: I want to write Geosynchron and thus finish the Jump 225 trilogy as quickly and comfortably as possible, with as few oh-shit-I’ve-lost-two-hours-of-work moments as possible. What’s my best option?