A while back I wrote about the “death” of my iBook. I’ve been getting by by sharing my wife’s PowerBook (which made things tough when we were working on a website or something) and pressing into service our older Dell Inspiron 5100 (ok, but issues with battery life and the fact that the “T” key cap seems to be missing).
Over the weekend I broke down and purchased an HP DV6000 from WalMart. Yes, I would have preferred another Apple, but although I consider them to be about the same price point as a comparable Windows machine, I just didn’t have that much spare change. The HP clocked in at about $550, which I couldn’t match from Apple even with a Military discount. Maybe in a year or two I can re-upgrade to the MacBook Pro or something.
I do have to say that the HP has incredibly sharp graphics, and the AMD dual-core processor does an adequate job with Vista (Home Premium). I’ve been surprised with Vista given all the bad press it has received. I won’t attempt a review right now, but although here are a few annoyances (nothing that I wouldn’t expect moving to a new OS), it’s worked pretty well for me so far.
The biggest problem has been finding replacements for all the OS X software I’ve been using for development. Having SSH and SFTP built into the shell (like OS X) is so convenient, and even though Putty works Ok, I still miss that nice integration. So I’m open to suggestions for things like:
- SFTP client. Command line or GUI based.
- Good, free, editor. On the Mac side I use SubEthaEdit. Open Source would be great, but not a requirement.
- Anything else you all can think of
Remember, even though I use XP at work, I’m a Unix/Linux guy at heart, so I’m behind on my Windows tools knowledge.
3 responses so far ↓
1 phabez // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:42 am
scp - for sftp (free)
i use notepad2 as textdeditor (free too)
good site for free software is lifehacker.com
2 Archaeogeek // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:51 am
I like programmers notepad http://www.pnotepad.org/ for editing, but I don’t think you can go far wrong with the putty/psftp combo , or get fireftp in firefox. I’d be interested to know your thoughts on Vista in a few months time- I was quite happy with it for ages but then it started to get annoying (stopping running programmes that it had happily run, for no obvious reason), and the difficulty in actually finding anything out about what the problem is just really got to me in the end.
3 Walt // Mar 13, 2008 at 10:17 am
Ok, thanks to you both.
@ phabez: I have been trying WinSCP, but ran into a strange little problem last night - when editing on my BSD home server it seemed that my changes were “lost”. I got no error, but the files didn’t change either in one particular directory. All the others worked Ok, and permissions looked Ok as well. SSH’d with Putty and used vim and all was well. So some more experimenting with WinSCP is in order.
@Archaeogeek: I’ve been using FireFTP, and it works well, but sometimes I just like to drop into the command line or write a script to handle some recurring task. I’ll check out psftp.
I’ll add a reminder to do an update on my experiences with Vista in a few months.
Leave a Comment