The Dell

So for the first 6 months with "The Dell" I whined a lot and carried my personal Mac around a lot, switching to it when I actually wanted to get anything done. I was irritated by the non-stop software updates and constantly annoyed at how long the shutdown process became because of this (I won't leave my desk until I can shut the laptop lid).

After a while I realized that the Dell wasn't that bad, it was no Mac but at least it had XP installed and not Vista, I could get up to three hours out of the battery when connected to wi-fi - others in the office who installed vista struggle to get to one hour.

I started to switch the applications I used to get cross platform utility, I downloaded Safari, iTunes, Dropbox, Evernote and FeedDemon (NetNewsWire on the Mac) and I tried to build myself a PC user experience that emulated the function of my Mac even if I couldn't get the elegance of the OS or the simplicity of the Dock and Expose.

Finally one day I found Launchy it isn't quite Quicksilver or spotlight but at least I could get rid of all those horrible shortcuts from my desktop, maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I thought...