From Windows to Mac and Back Again

Posted by curtisas on February 7, 2012 05:41 pm 131

So, I don't know why I am posting this, maybe just to see if there are any other people out there like me, or maybe I'm just curious to see what you all think.

I grew up in a Windows household, and the first OS I actually remember using is Windows 3.1 at my neighbors house. So it was pretty interesting that when I went to college I insisted that I wanted to get a Macbook Pro. So, for Christmas my senior year of high school (Dec. 2007), I was given a Macbook Pro. This was my main computer for the next 3 years, and through this time I used OSX almost exclusively (the occasionally bootcamp switch to windows vista/7 for games and programs only on windows). I even upgraded it to 10.6 when that came out, because I heard that it improved the performance.

Eventually, I ran out of hard drive space, so I bought a new hard drive off of Newegg and put that in and reloaded the operating system on it, and was happy for a while, but then I felt as though it was being a little sluggish, so one time my friends went to the local computer store, I went with them and picked up some new RAM, and installed that and was once again happy with my computer for a while. Then, Newegg had a sale on a laptop hard drive, so I bought it, but didn't install it right away, and when I finally did I decided to install just Windows 7 on it, and have a separate hard drive for Mac and for Windows. After a while, my dvd drive stopped working, so I figured out a way to install 2 hard drives in the laptop so I didn't have to switch them out every time I wanted a different operating system.

Then I started to notice something; I started getting more and more annoyed at OSX and the way it did things when I started getting engineering jobs (co-ops are required at my school, it was also the time when I bought an original Droid off of craigslist for $150, for some context). The way Finder (for those of you who don't know, the file browser) works was the thing that made me the most annoyed, and then just finding anything on it was an absolute chore. Things didn't work a lot, and I felt like Apple was trying to restrict the desktop operating system the way they did with iOS, especially with the announce of 10.7.

Then I started the process of building my own computer while still using mainly my laptop for home computing; sometimes on OSX, sometimes on Windows 7. A year and a half later, here we are, and I am noticing that when I use OSX on my laptop it, to quote Josh, feels like poison to me. Everything about it just annoys me: the fact that there isn't a quick way to launch programs like in Windows (EX: win+#), the file browser, the way it just *feels* slower than when I boot into Windows on my laptop, the way it doesn't work with my mouse the way I want it to, the fact that I am forced to have iTunes on it, the lack of support for many games and programs, and most importantly, the fact that it is almost impossible to do a secondary click.

There could be more things that I find annoying, but this is all I can think of right now, but essentially this is a long post of how I went Mac, and then came back. Have any of you had a similar experience?