I'm a PC again! : An ode to my new Dell XPS

A few months ago I switched to a Mac. At the time I felt like I was moving up in life... I indulged in Microsoft hate-speech, I loved the Mac vs PC commercials. My Mac was a bottom of the line 13 inch Macbook, bought on a student discount with an iPod Touch for $999. For a few days I was raving at how sleek it looked (and its charger looked and its packaging looked), and appreciated how Apple spent so much time and attention on making things really pretty. But that soon wears off... When it came to doing office work, the Mac is a complete pain. I work on chip design and connecting to remote Windows & Linux machines at the office is something I do very frequently. Also some people may be able to get by without the right & middle mouse buttons, but I truly can't. Carrying an external mouse is really cumbersome if you're watching TV on a couch. Quite honestly not supporting some of the very basic things we all assume on a PC is not something I want to compromise on. Home, End, Page Up, Page Down buttons also have two-key short cuts on a Mac... but why do I need to use two hands to do that?!

My experience with a PC was with a Dell Inspiron 8600 that I bought when I was in grad school for $1400 about 6 years ago. I never bought a new machine because it just worked fine. I replaced the keypad myself and also the battery once. My impression about Windows Vista was really negative, based not just on the reports I saw in the media but also based on first-hand impressions from my friends.

Today I've been playing on my Dell XPS M1530 all evening and I truly love it. I spent about $1250 on it:

- TV Tuner Card : Amazing! It works so well. It caught all the digital TV stations on a tiny antenna and now I can even record Jeopardy, or Leno, or Charlie Rose. What's more I can now watch TV in the kitchen or in the bedroom? And Media Center also allows you to watch TV shows or movie trailers synced from the Web.

- Biometrics : Logging in with my fingerprint... Now arguably I don't know if my wife can cheat the system yet, but so far I like being able to use my fingerprint instead of typing.

- IE 8 : Accelerators... yeah I know Firefox had all this already but IE8s text rendering is so much better.

- Gadgets : Amazing superb! Just what the doctor ordered. I wonder whether third-party gadgets are allowed.

- The Design : Black and Metal design... this PC looks really sleek! The touch-sensitive keys are great too.

All in all, I love this machine. It even has an NVIDIA GPU that I worked on. I know it only gets used when Aero is ON and when I am watching DVDs for most parts, but hopefully someday I could code using CUDA on this baby. Great job all you engineers! :)