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I recently got a Dell Latitude E6400 so figured that I would try to get on Hacker News like Tim did about his Mac workflow. Something tells me this might be a difficult thing

I have made the switch back to PC from Mac. I switched to Mac in the first place since I had my old IBM T41 stolen and at the time the MacBook actually seemed like good value. Some of the main reasons for switching back include the fact that I needed a new laptop and didn’t want to have to buy *another* special connector from Apple to connect to an external monitor, nor could my Mac handle Eclipse even at 2.4GHz with 2GB of RAM (well OS X couldn’t but VMWare could … sort of. Maybe I was doing something wrong!). Oh and did I mention that my new Dell is 25% cheaper than the equivalent MacBook Pro and that includes a Dell 3 year onsite next business day support package? Next business day! I never want to have to talk to an Apple Genius ever again just to have them tell me that they have to send off my computer to get anything fixed.

Ok, in with how (and why) I use my Dell.

Operating System

While it comes at a premium, increase of $50 or something, I had no choice but to go with the “downgrade” to Windows XP Business. I really appreciate that Dell gives users that option cause if I had to get Vista I would have probably gotten a Mac instead. XP is totally fine and I see far fewer slow downs or crashes than I did on the MacBook - YMMV. All the Dell Control stuff is pretty annoying for changing mouse, wireless and most other settings, I much prefer the native Windows or OS X feeling of those.

Hardware

I use the great “nipple” mouse pointer that is a nice reminder of my old ThinkPad and turn the touch pad off completely. The E6400 has a light monitor and adjusts the LED screen and keyboard backlight appropriately - it’s nice that they are on par with Macs on that feature. It has a SmartCard reader, VGA and HDMI (or at least some sort of digital video thingy) along with all the standard USB etc ports and DVD.

Disks and Backup

Holy shit do I ever love Windows Exploring! I don’t think that I have ever seen a more annoying piece of software than Finder. What is amazing is that most Apple users even agree with me that it is completely terrible. Good thing that they added stacks in the dock in Leopard and left Finder as is …

Everything for me is in the cloud (Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Wordpress, Google) so I don’t really backup much. However, just for save keeping I do put a few things on an external hard drive and my music is all on my iPod - though most of my music I couldn’t care less if it all got lost.

Taskbar

I don’t really use the taskbar too much. Alt+tab and Windows+e/r/m get do pretty much everything you need. Of course for everything else there is Launchy (Alt+space) that is just like QuickSilver or Spotlight and it is open source to boot (as if I am really going to go in there and try to change it or something!). I tried Dash Command but it didn’t even find Firefox. The one thing that I used to use a lot was the address bar, however, Microsoft had to get rid of it in SP 3 for some reason *facepalm*.

I use the quick launch tray a little bit - mostly just for my different browsers that I need for testing. and of course the tasktray is filled a whole pile of shit. With the address bar gone I am thinking that I might just try hidding the taskbar all together.

Screen

I use an external monitor most of the time aside from when I work at home and lounge around on the couch. The screen is a bit more compact than a MacBook Pro at 14″ but with the same lovely 1440*900 resolution. I was really fealing squished on that MacBook 1280 resolution. I never used spaces on the Mac so no love lost there, however, expose did come in handy once in a while and I am searching for a good alternative on Windows - most I have found only respond to key presses (F9-11) but maybe that will be ok.

Terminal

I use terminal a lot for building, ssh, mysql etc and Command Prompt works just fine for me (Update: as long as it is augmented with Cygwin). I increase the default settings of course so that I can actually see it and definitely increase the buffer size to something reasonable. Thinking of tricking out the colors from just basic black and white but haven’t yet. I did like the semi transparent Terminal.app but that is just superfluous really.

Mail

Google. Google mail is great. I can’t imagine using something like Outlook or *shudder* Thunderbird.

Calendar

Ditto.

Browsers

I use Firefox 3 for most of my browser since I love the address bar search feature - it is amazing - as well as the saving / restoring of open tabs. I usually have a lot of tabs open and once in a while Firebug will cause Firefox to crash so being able to load up those old tabs is a god send. Oh yah I use Firebug, all the time. Love it. I need to use IE6-8 for testing as well as Firefox 2, Safari 3 and Opera 9. I might consider trying Safari 3.2 as my default browser but will see.

Coding

I use Eclipse Europa for most of my coding needs. I never really got into TextMate on the Mac but tried some alternatives on Windows like E-Editor and Intype but neither of them even had a “search in project” feature so both were quickly trashed. E-Editor didn’t even support my mouse wheel for scrolling. In addition to Eclipse I have a few important plugins like Flex Builder (which of course now includes JSEclipse for some inane reason) and I use Aptana for HTML and CSS editing as well as Rad Rails for RoR and their Adobe AIR plugin. Eclipse also has Git and Subversion plugins which really rounds out the needs for writing code. I occasionally use Visual Studio - which is a great IDE - and use MySQL for most of my database needs.

Other Clients

I am finally getting back onto IRC with mIRC, while I use Twhirl for Twitter and GTalk for chat. I am very happy to no longer be using Adium. I have Office installed but use Google Docs just as much probably since most things need to be written collaboratively. I might try OpenOffice 3. Of course I use iTunes for music and, come to think of it, maybe my Dell will actually be able to play to my AirTunes which my MacBook has not been able to do for the past several months. I also use Tortoise and Subversion of course and these days Git too with msysgit which is not all that bad.

Security

What’s that? I leave my Windows firewall off cause it’s annoying. I haven’t had security problems in a long time unless you consider having your laptop stolen from your office a security problem - I can only assume it went to a good cause (Vancouver DTES).

One last thing, did you know that when you click on the maximize button in Windows XP the window will actually fill the entire screen. True story.

This is just my exerpience over the last year. YMMV. Let the flaming begin!

Tags: apple, dell, e6400, latitude, mac.