Ok, ok I take a hint. Enough of you have complained about the untenable size and bloat of my photos page. I can’t help it if you guys are on OLD and antiquated connections… Or can I? Well, seems that you chaps have brickbat’d me into submission. I will be removing the pictures from the website and hosting them again using jAlbum, the best album software period.

However, this also marks a unique paradigm shift for yours truly. I am now ready to drop the bomb…

I am moving back to Vista.

Yes you read that right, a Mac fanboi is back to Vista. If you will hear me out, I shall explain.

No-one is more enthusiastic about the Mac as yours truly, ask anyone I know. However, I have noticed of late, that the software I use on the Mac although slick and very easy to work with, does not offer me the customizability and the ease of the same as is offered by Windows. To take a very simple example. ACDSee 3.1 I use as a complete Explorer replacement on Windows. It is an AIO launcher and Image viewer,  using which I can order my files in the way I want. Such a software is sorely lacking for Mac. I tried it all, CocoviewX, Ekspos, etc etc, none of them offer me the functionality even close to ACDSee.

Next, torrents. There is simply no Mac or Linux equivalent of µTorrent. Transmission is good, but it just pales in comparison to the control that µTorrent offers. No individual choosing of files, nothing.

Next, chat clients. Except iChat, there are simply no good Chat clients on Mac. MSN for Mac is a woefully inadequate software that offers next to nothing of what Messenger Live! for Windows does. No webcam support most of all, no plugin enhancements and the like. Adium and others just don’t make the cut. Sorry. A personal opinion. Skype functions much the same way on Windows though.

Next Mail, and OSX offers its Mail client which is really superb, but unfortunately not nearly as powerful as Outlook for Windows which is an AIO application. Add to that my organization is reliant on Exchange and Entourage on Intel Macs is just not an elegant solution.

Now for the most compelling personal reason to shift to Win. My camcorder – DCR SR300. An HDD cam, with MPEG-2 file format. Just so disappointed, just ever so disappointed with iMovie. I was really delighted when in the product description, I read that iMovie ’08 would support SR300, by which I understood MPEG-2. But beware, that is not the case. It does support the capture from SR300, however on the other hands it does NOT support importing MPEG-2 files to the timeline. I found this out thus: I connected my camcorder to the Mac and iMovie recognized it at long last. It then showed me a  thumbnail view of my 300 odd MPEG-2 files on my Cam, totaling up to 30 Gigs in storage. It then tried to download them to the iMovie timeline but crashed every time. I could not, for the life of me, fathom why. I downloaded my files to my local HDD and tried to import them to iMovie. Should work right? There is SR300 support, therefore MPEG-2 support for iMovie, right? No, wrong. It does not import.

I love my Mac, therefore I tried to convert the MPEG-2 to DV format, and left my C2D system converting the files all night long. This  morning I tried importing them in iMovie and lo and behold, it works! But then I try exporting to ugh MP4, or DVD… and the quality is just so bad that I could cry. I really just was disgusted. MPEG-2 is lossy enough, convert that to DV, and convert that down to MP4? That is just insane. However again, iMovie is seriously stunted in this respect. Vista Movie Maker as used by my Rissa, is so much more powerful in this respect.

I love my Mac, and would love to stay, but I need to be productive, and the Mac isn’t really helping me out there.  but really see no alternative. So alas it is time to shift back to Windows. *sigh*