I’ve enjoyed having a Mac, ever since I made the switch. Now, though, my Mac is unwell. I’ve booked in at the Apple store to take it in – I think it needs a new hard drive. Until then, though, I only have my old Windows XP Tablet PC. It’s quite old, and slow, with a small screen, and no access to any of the data on my Mac’s hard drive, or any of the external drives I used.

So. How’s that working out for me?

Surprisingly well, really. It’s not pleasant, but it’s usable for a while. I think I miss the hardware more than the software, though I certainly prefer Mac OS to Windows XP. The screen is so small and so low down that I’m feeling the risk of neck ache, and it doesn’t feel good for my eyes. I’ve been spoiled with that 24″ screen, though!

One of the first things I did was to install ResophNotes, which gives me access to my writing and ‘thinking’ space – the same data I’d normally access through Notational Velocidy on the Mac. I have DropBox, so many of my current files are still available. Although I use Apple’s Mail app for my email, it’s all stored in Gmail, so I can just open a browser tab and I have my email all up to date. I’m a little in limbo at the moment for calendars, but Google Calendar is currently my ‘master’, so I have that available.

I keep my notes in Evernote, so I just updated that to the latest version and let it sync. I’m using the web version of Twitter instead of the Tweetie (or Twitter official) client. My tasks are all in Remember The Milk, so they’re online anyway.

I had access to all of my most important data very quickly.

I’m still missing all the data on my external drives. Windows would be able to access them if they weren’t in Mac OS Extended format, but that would mean I wouldn’t be able to use Time Machine to keep them backed up. And since it’s Time Machine that means I’ll be able to bring my Mac home with a new hard drive and get it back up and running to pretty much where I was, I’m happy with the trade-off.

I’m not really much of a gamer. I play a bit, but it’s generally ‘casual’ games. I don’t have a console, and I don’t think it would be worth buying one for the bit of gaming I might do. A Wii [: UK, US] might be worthwhile, but we’d have to buy a TV to go with it first, and that’s quite a bit of money.

When I switched to Mac some time ago, I was prepared for the fact that there weren’t as many games available. Before that I’d been using a tablet PC with no CD or DVD drive, which would have been enough to stop many games from working anyway. Age of Empires is the only ‘real’ game I’ve played much of, and even that probably averages out to less than one game every couple of weeks.

All that said, I was still quite glad to see the arrival of Steam for Mac, with a bunch of new games available, and more to follow. Even better, to celebrate the launch, they’ve made Portal free for both Mac and PC for a couple of weeks. Portal is similar to the old platform games we used to play back in the days of 8-bit home computers, but with a big twist. It’s fully 3D, from a first-person perspective. Imagine a first-person shoot-em-up like the old Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Unreal Tornament, etc; but instead of running around shooting anything that moves, you’re walking around completing a series of puzzles. In the early stages, at least, there’s very little real peril. Nothing is trying to kill you, and you’ll work the puzzle out eventually. In the stages I’ve reached now, though, things are getting a little more dangerous, with a few ways to die.

The result, for me at least, is a more fun experience. The puzzles are cleverly built, and there’s sometimes more than one way to beat them. It’s very immersive, and takes a bit of thought.

Steam itself seemed quite flaky at first, crashing several times as I tried to have a look around the store. It was updated the next day, though, and again the day after, and seems much better already. I’ve heard elsewhere that this is fairly common with Steam and their products – lots of problems for the first day or two, but they quickly fix things.

I’m eying up my next Steam purchase already (I suspect Civilization IV is my kind of game), but it’s well worth taking the chance to get Steam and Portal while Portal is free.

I’ve done a bit of cutting down on what I keep running on my Mac recently.

I used to keep lots of apps running all the time – email, Tweetie, Evernote, iTunes, Transmission, Google Chrome. All running, all the time, even overnight. Chrome always had a few tabs open – PigPog’s dashboard, Facebook, Google Reader, and usually a few things that I might decide to do something with at some point. It was a land of distractions, and things ground to a halt when I tried to run Aperture.

I installed iStat Menus, after reading about it in Smoking Apples. Aperture ran, and all my RAM was used. MacOS paged furiously out to disk, but couldn’t really keep up. Aperture would hang when building previews, sometimes for hours on end.

I tried closing almost everything else, but it didn’t help much.

I finally got around to testing the two 2Gb memory modules I’d removed when one became faulty, found out which one it was, and put the other back in. My Mac now had 3Gb rather than 2Gb.

I ran Aperture. It quickly used over 2Gb RAM all on its own, finished the processing it was doing, and shrank back down to around 200Mb. Just as it should. Looks like the problem was that with 2Gb of RAM, doing that just took a lot of paging in and out, and so, a lot of time.

By then, though, I’d taken a bit of a liking to having less stuff sitting open. I do quite like to see emails when they arrive (I don’t get many at home, so it’s not much of a distraction), but I don’t always need the Tweetie window there on show. iTunes doesn’t need to be running when my iPod isn’t actually syncing. Evernote doesn’t need to be running all the time, though it’s quicker to throw things into it if it is. Mail can at least be closed overnight.

As for the browser, I’m trying to make it a habit to leave it running, but with no windows actually open. That way, it’s very quick to start if I click a URL somewhere, or want to have a quick look at Facebook. The rest of the time, though, there’s no need to keep things open. I just need to check for any spams or comments on PigPog once or twice a day, and look at Facebook occasionally. Google Reader doesn’t need to be checked obsessively – just looked at sometimes. When I want to.

So far the results are good. I’m spending less time repeatedly checking the same sites and feeds several times an hour. The only problem is staring at the relatively blank screen, and wondering what to do next. I decided to write. I’m writing this now.

Producing some sort of output, rather than staring at Facebook and Twitter for an hour – sounds like an improvement to me.

[Updated at end]

I hadn’t actually planned to take two days off work so I’d be off for the day of release of Snow Leopard. It just happened that way. I’d booked the time off in order to spend a little time with Sam’s mum (quack, quack). Then, it just happened that the second day I’d booked was the day of release.

So, it would have seemed rude not to go to Exeter, pop into the Apple Store, and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard Family Pack.

So we did.

It was packed. Really, amazingly busy. There were a few people buying Snow Leopard, but most of the crowds were there for Macs, accessories, iPods, support, training, etc. The staff were doing their best, and were doing a nice job of occasionally hurrying down the lines of people, apologising for the delays, and promising to get to everyone soon. I joined a queue after a while, and paid for Snow Leopard. I also had a mouse to sort out, but that’s another story.

I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t in a desperate hurry when we got home, but the pressure was too much. I soon gave in, and stuck the DVD in the drive. I made sure that Time Machine had backed up recently enough, then ploughed in to the upgrade. In a disaster, I figured I could always install again from the original Leopard CD that came with my Mac, and migrate the data and apps from the Time Machine backup.

There was no disaster.

It took around an hour in total, and I was left with a system that worked pretty much the same as it did before, with a few nice little tweaks. Purely subjectively, things feel nice and snappy – I think it’s faster in quite a few places. It’s always difficult to be sure with such things, though, without any real testing.

So far, the only app that didn’t work was CyberDuck, but a quick check for the latest version showed a new beta that worked fine. It turned out, that was the final anti-straw to get me to make a little donation to the developer. It’s a free app, and works really well.

All told, there isn’t a huge amount to get excited about in Snow Leopard, but for the small cost, it seems well worth it. An cheap, easy upgrade that made the OS smaller and faster, whilst polishing a few features.

Surely that shouldn’t seem as strange as it does?

I’m left with just a couple of oddities. Video is jerky in QuickTime, though it may only be when using Perian codexes. Hopefully an update to one or the other will sort it out soon. Also, when I close iTunes, it immediately restarts itself, and hides the window.

Neither are major problems for me, so I’ll just Google them occasionally – answers usually take a little while to appear for a new product.

Update: Found the solution to the iTunes problem. I was running a little app called I Love Stars, which put a control to rate tracks into the menu, hiding itself unless an unrated track was playing. Getting rid if it removed the problem. It wasn’t causing the problem until Snow Leopard, so either something changed, or it was quite a coincidence.

The jerkiness may be more widespread than I’d thought – some YouTube videos seem jerky now, and some animations, too. Aperture’s keyword controls are supposed to slide neatly into view, but actually appeared in a series of jumps, taking a long time to fully display. Right-clicking seems to take a very long time in a few places, too, including iTunes.