A Mac user switches to Vista

Going mobile
Going mobile with the huge, heavy HP dv9000 was out of the question for me. Way too much to carry and work with at the local Border’s café. So I called my press contact Janet, and she offered to send a smaller, but very powerful little Dell 12” widescreen notebook.

Which meant I was now faced with moving everything I transferred from the Mac to the HP over to the Dell. While this sounded like a nightmare, I was blow away by how easy it was, thanks to a built-in Vista utility called Easy Transfer and a customized $39.99 USB cable from by Belkin. Plug the two machines together, run the program, tell it which direction to transfer, and off it goes. By the time I came back from a short gym workout, the entire process was done. The only transfer I’ve seen go so smoothly is when using the Mac’s Migration Assistant to move from an old PowerBook to a newer one.

Though the Dell made me happier with Vista, certain un-pleasantries began to reveal themselves. First, Dell chose to put some of the machine’s vents on the underside – which required me to balance it by its edges between my legs. What’s more, the unit’s exhaust fan runs almost constantly,  which to me is a total annoying on any computer.

Worse, when I closed the lid one night before heading to my sister’s place for a sleepover, I arrived to find the notebook hot to the point of painful to touch when I drew it out of my backpack. Apparently the machine woke itself from hibernation mode — which is the safest way to travel because it — usually — saves everything in memory to disk then shuts all the way down. Not so with the Dell. After much research it turns out the power settings were set to a new “hybrid” suspend mode. Eventually I found an command — “powercfg –h on” — that I needed to run as a DOS command to force the Dell to give me the option to choose ordinary, full-shutdown hibernation. Not very intuitive, and definitely dangerous to anyone used to just shutting the lid and packing their notebook in a bag.

Security concerns
A few years ago I bailed on Windows after my credit card number was stolen by an individual named Phrank who used it to purchase music from Real.com. This in spite of the fact I was running a full security suite plus three anti-spyware programs. So, as much as I’d loved playing 3-D games and was able to do more, I’d had it, and switched to the Mac.

Times have changed. And I’m happy to report — and Microsoft no doubt even happier — that I’ve had zero indication of any kind of net-related badness since switching to Vista. Microsoft now bundles in a more powerful firewall program for controlling access in and out of your computer. It also includes Windows Defender, an anti-spyware program. For antivirus protection you’re on your own — or you can go with Microsoft’s own Windows OneCare, which brings all security duties under one neat, tightly integrated roof. In repeated scans for viruses and spyware, OneCare, combined with the security features built into Vista, appeared to be doing its job of preventing attacks on the Dell.

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