开云体育

Part 6.

After messing with the new Lenovo, I've decided that the Mac is the
slight winner, and that perhaps I'm just a spoiled little Mac girl who
thinks that everything should work perfectly all of the time. I won't
recap my previous antics (
), but in the two weeks or so since I freaked out on the Mac and
ordered the Lenovo as it's replacement, I've come to realize: "shut
the hell up Heath".

My conclusion, all computers suck some of the time, some more than
others. I thought running Crestron on the Mac, with it's fine-tuned
Windows installation sucked most of the time. It doesn't. Keyboard/
trackpad is a bit lacking, hard Drive access is a bit slow in certain
cases (due to the VM layer), USB support comes and goes (due to the VM
layer), 3D graphics is nearly impossible (due to the VM layer) but
when it comes down to it, I have it pretty good.

I cracked open the new Lenovo W500. It's a pure-business looking
machine. It's got every button I could want right on the face of it,
plus about fifty that I kept tripping over - I figure I would get used
to the extras. It was black plastic, with a matte finish case and a
matte finish screen. The mouse pad was about 1/4 the size of the mac,
which was odd at first, but so was using the Mac trackpad when I first
started got it. All business.

I started out with a stress test, loading a game that I play too
much. Wanted to see if the video was up to the malfunctioning Mac's
level (the Mac's video card or drivers have issues that sometimes
causes hard crashes when in Boot Camp Windows.) The game sucked.
Graphics were choppy. I thought maybe the patchy method of
installation that comes with MMOs might have something to do with it,
so I downloaded a clean, full version of the game and reinstalled it.
It was much better, but still nowhere near the quality of the Mac when
it's not crashing. Strike one. Part of this was my fault as it turns
out. The W500 comes with a "workstation" class graphics card, FireGL,
not a card geared for gaming. But this was just for play...

Serious work, I loaded up the Crestron software. Fired up some apps,
loaded some programs, got everything going and it felt slower. I
broke out the stopwatch and discovered that even though similarly
spec'd (the mac has a slightly faster CPU), load times on the Mac VM
were always 10-20% faster. Once one gets used to it, the trackpad on
the Mac is slick. It is much more efficient to get around. Strike two.

Had a BSOD at some point. I can count on one hand the number of those
I've seen on my home-built PCs. While I've had unscheduled shutdowns
on the Mac VMs I've never experienced a BSOD. It's possible that the
VM is masking the blue-screen portion of the hard crash. It was
always Parallels that seemed to randomly fail. Fusion has been nearly
perfect.

Then there was the non-Crestron apps. How can anyone in their right
mind use Outlook for anything? It is the single most bloated, hard to
configure, hard to use piece of software I have ever seen. It is no
wonder large organizations that use Outlook have rooms full of tech-
help. I tried connecting it to my IMAP email account. After 3-4
tries I got connected, but it sure was weird. Deleting a message
merely marks it for deletion? What the... All those stricken-through
message titles in my mailbox sure did make it easy to read. (I did
figure out how to delete them, permanently. No trash folder.) I
couldn't keep track of all of the various layers of Personal Folders,
Inboxes, etc. What a damn mess. I decided to go back to something
that I was familiar with: Thunderbird for email. It set up in
seconds and worked properly from the start, but it sure was slow
compared to Apple mail. And then what about my iPhone sync... Strike
three. For everyday stuff, Apple's apps are pretty slick. No Adobe
Reader either!

Now in the real world not inhabited by us insane Mac users, all of
this might be tempered somewhat by the fact that the Lenovo costs
roughly half that of the Mac, and the Lenovo has a higher-resolution
screen. But considering that I already own the Mac and that I would
lose quite a bit of cash trying to sell it, that sort of nullifies the
cost discussion. The slightly lower resolution Mac screen was far
superior, even with the lousy shiny glass, then the Lenovo. I think
if I had spec'd the Lenovo with the exact same features as the Mac
(bigger HD, 1 GB more RAM that 32-bit XP couldn't access, .27 GHz
faster CPU) it may have cost about the same, but those additional
specs weren't the sort of thing to affect the day-to-day performance.

From a purely Crestron software in Windows standpoint, the "highly
troubleshot", minimal VMWare Fusion XP setup on the Mac was a clear
winner. I knew the Simpl Windows loads were fast (28 secs avg.) but I
fully expected them to be faster on a non-VM setup.

I was expecting better things from the Lenovo. Don't get me wrong,
it's a great machine. My point here was to acknowledge my whiny girl-
ness. The Mac is doing a great job in the grand scheme of things.
The Lenovo would have done a nearly as great of a job. It wasn't as
loaded up with junk as Sonys and Dells are, but it evidently had
enough stuff hidden in there to make things sluggish. Who knows what
I would have broken in the Lenovo by removing the bloat. I couldn't
tell what all the "think-ware" and "blah-blah-vantage" software on
there was doing, and frankly I wasn't willing to spend the time. I'd
still be stuck with Outlook at the end.


Heath


(I'll never complain about the missing delete key again.)