New computer

[ewx]

I bought a new computer. The main reason for wanting a new one is that for some time the images my current camera produces are large enough that my Mac Pro was rather slow on them. I’d have replaced it with another Mac but Apple’s current lineup was unattractive on both price and performance grounds, so I got a PC from World Of Computers instead. It seems to be fast enough.

It came with Windows 8. The addition of tablet features has generated a lot of fuss but in practice they don’t seem to get in the way; the usual Windows desktop is still there with the only significant difference from Windows 7 being that the start menu has turned into a start screen. Setup has mostly been easy though installing suitable drivers for my printer was a massive pain.

I’m using PuTTY more than I used to. The lack of tabs and clickable URLs makes it somewhat painful compared to the terminals available in the Linux and OSX worlds.

I’ve played through Portal 2, which is great fun. I’ve also started on Starcraft 2, though successfully creating a Blizzard account and downloading it was a bit of a struggle.

Comments

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I've found that when I need to do a lot of Unixy things on Windows, these days the easiest thing is to have a VM running to switch to. RAM is cheap...

[gerald_duck]

I always feel that tabbing shouldn't be part of the application, it should be part of the window manager: it's not clear that it benefits one application more than another.

For one thing, applications are the wrong conceptual groupings. I want the editor windows, compiler windows, Wikipedia look-up and e-mail thread for a problem I'm working on grouped together, rather than all my editor windows in one place, PuTTY windows in another, etc.

For another, I seem to know better than application designers whether I want virtual desktops, MDI, tabs, tree tabs or separate windows in any particular circumstance.