Since then I've used my Mac for both work and personal activities. Everything was easy when I did Java or iPhone development, and when I did .NET I would run Windows in a virtual machine. It has been very convenient to have only one go-to machine for everything I wanted to do.
Recently it has become a pain. I've been doing much heavier .NET development which pushed my MacBook Pro to the limit. It has four gigabytes of memory and when I run a Windows VM with only one gig the Mac side still worked fine, but I needed at least two gigs on the Windows side for this project and I was constantly hitting my memory capacity.
As a result I had to limit the number of apps I would run on the Mac side to a bare minimum. If I wanted to open iTunes I had to close NetNewsWire and vice versa. And the Windows side also ran at a snail's pace which was seriously cramping my productivity.
Eventually I concluded that I was living with the worst of both worlds, so I notified our IT department that I was in need of a beefy Windows laptop. They quickly set me up with a Dell Latitude E6410, which is an excellent little computer.
The most impressive thing is its speed. It's 18 months newer than my MacBook Pro which means a faster CPU, but I believe the biggest factor in its peppiness is the solid state drive. Now that I'm not lugging around my entire Aperture photo library with me I don't need a lot of disk space. I'm convinced now that my next MBP will have an SSD as its main drive and I'll use an external drive for photos.
There's no need to check the temperature in hell, I'm not switching back to Windows. My personal machine remains a Mac, and I'll use that for work again if I end up back on a non-.NET project. Windows 7 is a major step up from XP, but it is still no OS X.
Now I need to adjust to life without having everything I need on one machine. I'll write about how that goes in a later post.
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