Windows Laptop : Update

Some of the photos of me a nlOUG showed me with my MacBook Pro, which caused some amusement for a few people as I wasn’t using my new Windows laptop, so I thought I would give an update…

The new laptop got delivered while I was in Riga, so I had 4 days between picking it up and leaving for nlOUG. I picked it up from work at 21:00 on the Friday, but didn’t start playing with it until the next day. By the end of the morning it was my main computer.

As far as I can remember I only had one hiccup, which was down to a thunderbolt driver that meant my dock wasn’t working properly. I installed the latest driver from the Dell website and everything was fine.

All my test environments are built using VirtualBox, Vagrant and Docker, so rebuilding all my testing stuff was a matter of issuing a command and waiting. 🙂

So why didn’t I take the new laptop to nlOUG? Two reasons.

• Like most new laptops, it has thunderbolt and USB-C ports and not much else, so I was waiting for a travel adaptor to arrive. The dock I’ve got is quite big, so I wasn’t going to take that with me.
• At that point I hadn’t practised using the new laptop with a projector. I had used it with a second screen, but I wanted to try it out in a more realistic situation. I’ve since done that with a projector at work.

I don’t believe I’ve even turned on the MacBook Pro since I got back from the Netherlands, so as it stands, I’m planning on taking the new laptop to Oracle Code : Paris.

Now for some general thoughts…

Something that did surprise me a little was how weird it felt using Windows at home for a while. I use Windows 10 at work and I would often log into my work machine from the MBP when I was at home or away at conferences, so I expected there to be zero mind-shift from this move. I was really surprised how much my mind would just switch when I was working on my own stuff at home, compared to when I was doing my real job. So funny.

It’s nice to be able to use mapped drives reliably again. The MBP was terrible at dealing with my NAS. Didn’t matter what I tried, it would drop connections, and judging by Google I was not alone with this. The Windows machine is 100% so far.

As I’ve said before, most of my life is spent using a browser and a shell prompt connected to local or cloud VMs. As a result I am not tied to any desktop OS, but I’ve definitely been less frustrated with Windows 10 than I was macOS and Linux before it. I’m not sure why I stuck it out for so long.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. For context, you might want to read my post here before you tell me how great your preferred desktop OS is… 🙂

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer. View all posts by Tim...