Quantum Forest

A few days without posting but first I was away in mighty Timaru and then my laptop underwent some serious upgrade. I will write about the latter here.

I have been using Parallels for a while, but despite all the good press I still find it painfully slow. I tend to use the windows side of things mostly for two things: scientific software (SAS, ASReml and arcGIS) and Quickbooks (cashbook for consulting income). The first category is very demanding on memory and disk space, while the second is just buggy and poorly written, but it works with what my accountant needs.

While I am using the programs under windows I am rarely doing something on the mac side of things. Thus, I think I am better off with dual booting for the few times when I need Windows in my laptop. Given that I was going to have to save all the data, partition the disk, etc. I also used this time for upgrading to Leopard (OS X 10.5) as well. I also upgraded to iWork 08, so I can waste only one day to have the laptop ready.

After a few configurations hiccups (mostly negotiating things with the network) the laptop is performing quite well. Windows XP runs very fast: in fact, faster than in any other laptop that I have used in the past. This afternoon I will install software on the XP side of things.