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It's Going Back

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So I've been trying the Powerbook out on and off for the past week now, and though I absolutely love the hardware, I can't deal with the poor text rendering in OSX.

I bought the machine for personal use to try out the other OS. (Yeah, yeah, there's Linux too, but that runs nicely in Virtual PC...)

But no matter how cool the UI is (and it is cool, not sure how it'll stack up against Longhorn though), I can't get past the text rendering. For me, it's just too blurry. And yes, I've scoured the web for solutions and tried them all. It just doesn't stack up to ClearType, no matter what people say. And I don't buy the "it's the way anti-aliased text looks in print" argument. For a start, it's not print, it's an LCD panel, and second, I don't care. Text in Windows just looks so much better. All of course in my humble opinion...

So it's going back tomorrow.

I'd been thinking all week "why can't PC manufacturers come up with a Windows laptop design as cool as the Powerbook?" The Powerbook design has everything. It's sleek, widescreen, all the I/O ports you could want. Bluetooth, wireless. Cool, geeky lights on the power connector port and latch - not to mention the very cool backlit keyboard.

Damn, I want to run Windows on this thing.

According to Scoble it looks like I might not have to wait for long. Maybe Apple will build it for me.

I wonder if it'll be possible to run Windows on an Intel based Powerbook?

Now that would be cool.

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» XP on a Mac from Random Thoughts

Thank you. I’ve been having an internal argument with myself over what laptop to get, and after using WinTel based laptops since my first one in 1993, I decided that it was time to try the “other” operating system on... Read More

2 Comments

dmouse said:

Have to admit it's not sleek but my siemens nixdorf amilo a1630 64bit laptop is the nuts. It's a little slow on xp but now the 64bit of windows is out i intend to upgrade to that. I was going to put on suse9.3 as i heard that it detected my onboard wifi but i'm too scared. :)

Does fly thou, and it means i can play counterstrike source with the onboard radeon 9700 pro. ;)

Only cost me a grand. So much cheaper over there i expect.

http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/products/mobile/notebooks/amilo_a.html

Chris Quirke said:

Did you ascertain what the display's native resolution was? LCDs tend to be hardwired to one resolution, and do a pixel-fudging "stretch to fit" if you set a lower resolution.

XP has 2 font-prettying methods, as well as None. I find None gives the crispest, most readable fonts, though at the expense of some pixel jaggies. The others deliberately blur the font edges so as to hide the pixel effect, using two different algos.

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About Me

Steve Lacey, software developer at Google, British, married to the lurvely Nabila, dad to the wonderful Julian and Jasmine. Living in Kirkland (near Seattle), WA.


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steve@steve-lacey.com
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This page contains a single entry by Steve published on June 3, 2005 9:47 PM.

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