Ben Goodger of Mozilla and now Google fame, isn’t very satisfied with his Windows computer lately. In fact, it seems to degrade over time.
When I bought this machine, a Dell Precision M60 with a Pentium M 1.7GHz processor, a 7200rpm disk and a gig of RAM, it could compile Firefox start to stop in 21 minutes. Now it takes over an hour.
The situation is better on my Google-supplied workstation, but for how long? Over time, Windows reaches a point of being completely useless for anything aside from the most basic activities. What’s the effect? I had planned to work both days this weekend on Firefox 2 features. Instead I spent the whole time fighting one of the most frustrating fights possible, and have achieved nothing. I hate Windows. I hate this computer.
He also spent a lot of time fighting with Microsoft’s software development tools. I’m not saying Ben is representative of the entire Windows development community, but when such a revered member of that group working on such a high profile program has these kinds of problems, it doesn’t reflect well on Windows as a development platform. Ultimately though, in a follow up post Ben wonders if the solution is Apple’s MacBook Pro. Sounds about right to me.
