The Windows 7 and Vaio X

I can't help but the admire the effort of Sony with the release of the new Vaio X ultraportable laptop series. They look damn sexy and all, and the specs weren't bad either. Still using the Intel Atom processor to save power and prolong battery life, they were clocked at 2MHz, runs 2GB RAM while using SSD hard drives as standard. I can imagine it whizzing through the usual web browsing at light speed. The performance with Windows 7 with it reduced demand on resources in the background will complement the unit nicely.

Always, the issue of vulnerability to viruses will be there and for that I am very reluctant to depend on them to hold my sensitive data - patient details, research data and even my collections of downloaded journal articles and presentations I have prepared over the years. I came to rely too much on my Mac. However, occasionally there are some software issues with the Mac especially when it comes to SPSS. I currently do not have a license on the Mac, and had to use VirtualBox to run Windows 7 on my Mac in order to do the number crunching. A spare Windows machine would not hurt I am sure, but I already have desktops on my office desk running Windows. Do I need another laptop ... be it a sexy one.

I think I'm going to go for a compromise. I might buy Anita the laptop. Therefore, I can still play around with the toy occasionally ... if she ever let me.

Have I gone to the Dark Side?

I spend the whole of yesterday trying to install XP on my MacBook Pro, finally succeeding by using Sun's VirtualBox. It worked a treat. No data loss and was able to get SPSS installed on it. Since I have gone that far, I decided to try Windows 7. First of all, I need to download the 2.4 GB data for the install disc. It failed to do so from my Streamyx. It kept being disconnected. The maximum speed for download was only 1Mb/s. It will take 6 hours to download the whole stuff while praying that the connection doesn't stall.

Check out the speed of the download. About 2 and half times faster than good old Streamyx. I turned the E71 into a base station connected to Celcom Broadband, and just use wifi connection to download.

Microsoft also did not help matters by insisting that we use a Javascript-based download manager to get the stuff downloaded through, and the script for obvious reasons were disabled on Safari. Luckily Firefox worked OK. I decided to use my E71 as a modem instead and haul down the data. It stalled when I try to download it straight from Microsoft's website. I searched the net and stumbled upon this. What I did was acquire a product key from Microsoft and download the program from this site with the help of Speed Download.

After another 30 minutes of installation and updating, everything was up and running. I'll let you know how everything works up.