I feel dirty...

Not because I haven't blogged for almost a month - though that, I should also be ashamed of - but, because I've just received delivery of my license for Microsoft XP Pro. Yes, you read that right.

But, do not worry, it's all in the best possible taste. I have ordered a 17" MacBook Pro and am expecting delivery next week. I will be running Windows XP on it both via BootCamp and via virtualisation. At this point, it looks like I'll be going down the VMWare Fusion route, rather than Parallels. I think VMWare is being aggressive in pricing, support and adding features as it comes from behind vs Parallels. We'll see.

I don't expect to use XP much, but I have some home automation components that haven't been updated since I stopped using an old Toshiba Libretto. My Virtual PC copies have never really worked on these items due to poor performance when doing serial operations.

I also wanted to have XP around to experiment a bit as well as to demonstrate to the great unwashed the flexibility of the Mac platform these days.

Looking back, I have bought a lot of Microsoft software over the years ranging from Multiplan, Excel/Word, followed of course by many copies of Office and Office X. I've also had Windows 95 and 98 via copies of Softwindows and Virtual PC. But these became poor when Mac OS X came along (I had to reboot into OS9 to get reasonable VPC performance).

Later this year I will undoubtedly purchase Office 2008 for Mac. I fully expect XP Pro and then Office 2008 to be the last Microsoft OS and Applications that I ever buy again.

Next up... Why XP Pro over Vista?

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X, MacBook Pro