I have access to both Windows 7 and Macs. I've been a Windows developer for a long time but with the improvements made in virtual machine solutions I've started doing most of my development work in vms. I find it refreshing to keep all my development work sandboxed in a system that I can easily take and rollback snapshots as needed. I recently ran some winsat checks on my native box (a Core i7 rig with 8gigs DDR3 memory) and a virtual machine configured to use all 8 cpus. The results were nearly identical with the virtual machine turning in 95% performance on cpu tests and beating the host system in disk tests (the vm was using a 80gig file as a disk).
So, since the VM is giving me enough performance to do my work I am really free to use whatever I like as a host system. So, here I am preparing to embark on a fun adventure.
I"m going to use Snow Leopard (in 64 bit mode) for 30 days while doing my Windows work in a VM. I don't intend to run back to Windows for anything during that time as I really want to force myself to use OS/X. During this time I'll blog frequently about issues I'm facing, things I like, things I don't like, and work arounds I've found.
So, to get started here's what my day normally looks like on the computer.
- Lots of development work on Windows (Visual Studio 2008 and 2010)
- IRC/Skype chatting with friends and co-workers
- Email with co-workers
- Using Google calendar to manage my day to day activities
- Editing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents (these are more rare these days but they do happen)
- Watching recorded tv shows from my Media Center HTPC
- Watching shows from NetFlix and Hulu
- Listening to music from Pandora, Slacker, Sky.FM, and personal music collection
- Blog reading/writing
- Facebook and twitter'ing
Well, wish me luck.