Yuck
I took my macbook into the local apple store to get the case fixed before Applecare ran out (it runs out on the 12th, just in time for the new trolley line to open) and when I got home I discovered, to my intense dismay, that of the three old macbooks (a first-gen intel Mac Pro, two first-gen Macbooks) I had lying around I had approximately zero that actually worked (well, it’s possible that one of the macbook works – it can’t find the hard drive, but I don’t have any lying around that are already formatted) and all I had was an old Compaq/HP running Windows 7.
The fonts are nice on Windows, but other than that boy is it horrible. It’s not Unix, so I don’t have my usual crop of command line tools, it doesn’t have a remote desktop that interoperates with the mac remote desktop server, so I have to use VNC, which is amazingly fragile (it drops the connection if there’s any sort of latency on the wire(less), but it drops the connection in such a way that leaves a stack of orphaned remote desktop processes spinning away in the background; after a few instances of this there are a stack of processes sucking the machine away and increasing latency to the point where VNC can’t even get to a login screen), I’m stuck with Google Chrome as a web browser because IE on this machine is larded up with a whole stack of HP adware (thanks, Carly-era HP for combining the worst of HP with the worst of Compaq!), and now that I’ve set up the entire local network to use zero-conf networking I’m stuck with a head that doesn’t do zero-conf and I have to resort to using IP addresses to talk to all of my MacOS servers.
Yuck.
3-5 days is what the people at the Apple Store told me. I’m hoping for 3, because I don’t know if I can deal with Windows for much longer than that.