Saturday, November 24, 2007

Technology meltdown (again) causes blog outages

Hey Readers!

Well, for the second time this year my traveling laptop refused to boot up. It's not such a bad problem when we're home at the Broadsword office, but it always happens when we're on the road, far away from discs, files, and backups. We love the Sony Vaio's here (light and fast) but after the third meltdown I'm looking for something new. They really don't hold up well on the road (sorry Sony).

I'm typing now on Patty's Apple MacBook and giving some thought to making the switch over to the dark side (or the white side, to be more precise). As a Windows user since the beginning (and DOS before that) I'm loathe to admit that a Mac might meet my needs, but with MS Office, MindJet's MindManager, and some of the other tools I use also available on the Mac, it might just work. I'm getting to the age where playing with drivers and hardware is just downright boring. I just want it to work!

Fortunately, we've been practicing pretty good Configuration Management here at the 'sword, so restoring files shouldn't be a problem, although emails could be a problem unless I go to another Outlook-capable system. I'll be executing a product-selection DAR soon enough on a new machine and software (if it's a Mac). I need to ad "durability" to my scoring criteria.

So, I'll start with a Requirements Development exercise, execute a DAR, and finally SAM using IPM/PP/PMC to help drive the process.

In the end though, the decision will be made by accounting :)

If anyone has successfully transitioned from Windows to Mac in an engineering work environment I'd be interested in hearing from you.

See you all when I'm back up and running!

www.broadswordsolutions.com

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