I settled in the other night to finish some of my pending writing assignments,
bringing out the
ThinkPad T43 to be my workhorse for this sess
ion. Truth be told, I am enamored with the keyboard, and wonder why Apple can't
make something that feels so fundamentally right. (Now I see all the flaws in
the
Powerbook keyboard, how the keys now seem too thin and hav
e sharp corners that sometimes catch on the corners of the ends of my fingers,
and how they donât have that satisfying click and feel of --- hang on.
Omig
od. Iâm being assimilated!)
Almost immediately I began to regret (once more) my decision to use the
Windows laptop.
Opening up the laptop,
I expected it to get me to the fingerprint security routine which is what it d
oes when you flip the screen open. Nothing. The
Sleep indicator light,
which is a
McTonight quarter moon, just glowed steadily as if
nothing had happened. I tapped on the little mechanical button on the upper le
ft edge of the keyboard on the off-chance that it didn't notice I had opened th
e ThinkPad up, but I got the cold shoulder. I tapped randomly on the keyboard,
and then finally on the power button. Nada. I was contemplating hard-starting t
he thing but it whirred to life all of a sudden. Huh?
And then it took forever to get me to the biometric log-on screen that wakes it
from sleep. When it finally got there, it took me even longer to just get it t
o resume; normally the biometrics are a hit-or-miss proposition, but tonight it
was totally striking out.
Refusing to take the easy way out (which was to do the three-finger salute and
then just type in your password like one normally does), I kept swiping my fing
ers every which way, all four that were enrolled with the system: fast, slow, j
ust right, with and without pressure, at different angles and all the different
permutations of the above. I felt skipping this part to use the more conventio
nal password routine was a cop-out, and completely misses the point of having a
biometric security system.
During this whole delay, one of the more irritating things was that it would fl
ash the window that I had succeeded in giving the fingerprint scanner a proper
entry, but it then just sits there, and then asks me to swipe again. It did thi
s several times, and in the end I had to succumb if I wanted any work done that
night.
Then I had to wait for the system to settle down to normal working mode. This i
s a curious, unspoken thing with the Windows machines Iâve used â it seems like
the machine has to go through near-endless hoops of setup before it settles do
wn. The hard drive activity light would flash continually, and there is an inte
rminable lag before anything is actually clickable. Well, maybe five minutes at
least.
As a Mac user used to a near-instant response I forget to give Windows this all
owance and I click on stuff, think that I missed when nothing happens so I clic
k again, and then once more to be sure. When things finally get going I end up
with four instances of
Firefox, three
OpenOffice Writer sessions and two Outlook Express w
indows.
âGet goingâ is actually a bit of an overstatement. The system crawls: windows h
esitantly pop in, refuse to work and when you try to drag them aside to see if
at least the other apps are working, they leave multiple copies of themselves b
ehind like the frothy wake of a speedboat in the lake, covering everything up a
nd rendering the system useless.
Ten minutes of this pass,
which is about all I could stand, but Task Manager and even <
strong>CTRL-ALT-DEL didnât work as they should. In the end I was force
d to just lean on the power button so it can do a hard reset, the first of seve
ral that day. (Later Iâd get back on my Powerbook and to download and install a
free licensed Mac version of
DIVX Pro that was posted on sist
er blog
PWiT, which required me to restart the m
achine, something that happened rarely. On a whim, I checked to see how long th
e Mac had been up. Nearly
two weeks. It had been almost thirteen days
since the last reboot, which was because of a Quicktime Security Update which r
equired it to restart, if I remember correctly. On the other hand I have to reb
oot the T43 at least twice a day.)
Now before you guys try to helpfully suggest that maybe as a Mac user I donât k
now what the hell Iâm doing, please note that I was, after all,
Editor-in-C
hief of
PC Magazine Philippines at one time, and can asse
mble a PC from scratch. I know that the Thinkpadâs 512mb RAM and modest video m
emory are probably the culprits, but man, I wasnât doing anything spectacularly
challenging, for Peteâs sake.
This was a branded IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad without any illegal or pirated software,
protected by a full licensed version of Norton 360 and regularly maintained at
the software and hardware level. I was just starting up and trying to get a co
uple of apps going as millions of other ordinary Windows users do every day. No
body should be made to go through this and made to believe that itâs ok. Thatâs
just not right.
Mac OS X and other operating systems can at least give their users a peaceful a
nd trouble-free first few minutes with the computer before anything goes flaky,
if at all. To be fair, once things âget goingâ with Windows itâs generally all
right, but at the back of your mind youâre always wary and thinking,
gad,
when is this thing going to flake out again; there is that Sword of Damocl
es hanging over your head threatening to skewer your skull. I canât work that w
ay.
Itâs just a matter of time before the inherent instability brought by a system
composed of an OS based on an ancient underlying framework (and forced to do so
to maintain compatibility with a ginormous industry making software and periph
erals based on this archaic system, and where the players donât even make an ef
fort to talk to each other to make sure everyoneâs on the same page), running o
n Frankenstein hardware with parts built by dozens of unrelated sub-contractors
and forced to work with each other by jury-rigged fixes and drivers and DLLs w
ill bring on any assortment of crashes.
On the other hand, thereâs the Mac: hardware and software all built by one comp
any where everyoneâs on the same page. And anyone from the outside wanting to m
ake anything for the system is forced to be on that page first before they can
do anything. Add to this a constant push to improve things and create new thing
s and make them with class, panache, wit, intelligence and a sense of humor.
But, you say, it all comes at a price. Literally. True. But most folk around th
ese parts buy bargain basement generic/no-name little cobbled-together monsters
that come with hard disks full of âfreeâ mainstream apps. Buy branded Windows
computers and you find they cost as much as, or even more, than an equivalent A
pple computer. What folk are actually complaining about is that there aren't Ma
c clones in Virra Mall, and that's the irritating thing.
NEXT: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
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