I used Windows 7 for an evening when setting up my sisters new laptop (64 bit for $800 dollars--I was startled when it turned out I'd downloaded the wrong iTunes), and it was much easier to do than her Vista laptop, especially the networking. I still have networking craziness with my desktop, and it's not like my home network is a moving target it. I just resent it now. I miss what came before.

Heh. I'm so slow that it's only YESTERDAY (after I"ve had the thing since August) that I finally managed ot figure out how to click on things while browsing the web on my iPhone so that I can open them in a new page, rather than always having to go there, and then hit "back" a lot. DUH. I was like "there's GOTTA be a way..."

I've liked Win 7, it has a lot of nice touches. It's done some stuff like automatically finding and installing the driver for my printer when I plugged in it. Hopefully, Microsoft can get more of that automatic configuration stuff going in Win 8. I had a few minor compatibility problems with the pre-release version, but not with the release version even though I went from 32-bit XP to 64-bit 7.

I was like "there's GOTTA be a way..."

That's often a sign that yes, there is a way....

Yeah, ita, setting up my (wirelessly networked) printer usually means searching for drivers, etc (the software that came with it sucks, so I do a way stripped install). But not with Win 7. Autooooomatic.

meara, I'm constantly wishing the Blackberry could do that.

I'm curious to try Windows 7. I can switch back and forth between the two OSes pretty easily as I have been doing so for well over ten years now. Though after falling head over heels in love with Leopard, I generally find Windows ugly and brutish. My understanding is that Windows 7 is a real improvement in that regard.

Ya, I'm a late adopter of the Mac. I started out on the TRS-80 model III, where you had to write code for each pixel "let x= blah and y=blah". Then in 9th grade, I was introduced to the 128k Mac, with a mouse! And MacPaint! And never looked back. I guess that all started around 1985 or so.

Um.... o_a, if you started using a 128k Mac in 1985 "or so", you really are not allowed to call yourself a "late adopter".

... how DO you do that, meara?

I, like ita and tommyrot, came to Macs through Linux. Pre-OSX I hated Macs and Windows equally, though Mac OS 9 was so incredibly dated by the time it ended that I probably hated it a tad more. When I think of the fact that Mac OS 9 was still being sold at the same time Windows 2000 (a pretty decent OS, I thought, and my favorite Windows until XP SP2 in classic view) was catching on I actually boggle a bit.

In early Mac years I was a child/pre-teen and used whatever my parents had, which happened to be an Apple II followed by various DOS/Windows machines. At 16 I built my own computer, installed Windows 98 and Slackware Linux on it, and found myself using Slackware a lot more often. A year later I wiped the Windows partition, changed to Gentoo Linux, and stuck with that until I was in college, when i picked up an old iBook G4 for portability. LOVED it (though i started off running X-windows on it a LOT), bought a G5 PowerMac the next year, and have been a Machead ever since.

I am really, really liking Windows 7 right now, though. In fact, when i boot into Windows instead of OS X, the only thing I miss at the moment is Pages, which I use for writing a lot of my worksheets as I hate Word 2008 on Macs. I could probably transition to a more modern Windows Word pretty easily if I wanted to pay for it, but I don't. I'll still boot to OS X for productivity work and keep Windows around for games and occasional odd software programs (video encoders and such).

Cap'n Crunch to say that today's News Post on Penny Arcade is quite related to this conversation. And rather well constructed. I really like Tycho's writing style much of the time.

(Also, to stick my head in about the key-combinations for copy/paste: It doesn't bother me at all when switching from home to work, but switching from Windows to Mac on the same computer? Horrific.)

We're a Mac household now (switched over when it was a choice between WinME and OSX), but since I grew up on Windows keyboards the first thing I always do when setting up a new machine is remap the CTRL key so copy-cut-paste work normally.