first few days on windows XP professional

I blogged a couple of days ago that I got a new laptop from work. It came with XP Pro installed (apparently I’m lucky in that respect since Vista probably won’t run too smoothly). Either day, I gave XP a serious chance and here’s my experience:

The good: so far no crashes. Installation took a while but was pretty smooth. It wasn’t too hard to find a good virus scanner either. The machine is relatively fast and responsive, even when I keep it pretty busy Also I managed to get the tools I needed to run. Cygwin (a linux shell on windows) and firefox (yay, running meebo) make life livable so far. The new office is less bad (i.e., a little bit better) than the previous versions that I’ve worked with. Now I only curse about twice a day instead of twice every ten minutes. Oh, all the hardware gadgets (wifi, hybernate, fingerprint reader, cd burner, et cetera) seem to work on the first go.

The bad: It’s windows… A while ago I got Beryl to work on linux (ubuntu) which makes it look awesome. XP is plain ugly. Also the suspend / reload functionality is a little bit slow. The mousepad works fine but the keyboard I’m not so sure of… Batterylife (approx 5 hours) is good but the XP indicator is constantly wrong, saying that I only have a few minutes left while, in fact, I still have a couple of hours left. The machine is a tat heavy and only supports 1024×768 resolution.

All in all I’m fairly pleased so far. Sure, I like linux better but at least XP has been stable so far. Also, in terms of hardware, the only bad thing I can think of is the low resolution. Batterylife is good and, given the specs, the machine is not overly heavy.

Will post more in a while