It’s time for “Good Idea, Bad Idea”

On the Animaniacs, there used to be a segment called “Good Idea, Bad Idea”, which was probably my favourite next to Pinky and the Brain.

In any event, this morning I will do my own version of this segment, which I’ll call “Good Idea, Bad Idea”.

Good Idea: Consolidating all your data and computer equipment to reduce the number of computers in your study and get rid of broken equipment.

Bad Idea: Running Windows in a virtual machine on your G5 iMac.

Allow me to explain the fundamental difference between UNIX / Mac OS X, and Windows: Hard drive, RAM and CPU usage. I still maintain that it was VMWare on my SUSE installation that killed my 60GB notebook drive, and only because I was running Windows in a virtual machine.

Last night I dabbled with a virtual machine on my iMac. Last night was the first time I heard my iMac getting hot. Last night I realised that the iMac might be struggling with running Windows, and that Windows is a complete resource hog. I already “knew” this, academically speaking, but this was (more) proof.

So.

The iMac is going to stay running OS X. It is also an FTP server, a web server, a file server and a music server (with iTunes). Consider, iTunes will bring my Windows machine to a crawl, and on the iMac, I don’t hear the cooling fans kick in at all.

Microsoft, you officially suck.

I “need” Windows for Visual Studio and SQL Server, and preferably Outlook (I like Outlook, ok?). But I’m wondering why I need to buy a damn rocket launcher just to develop software.

Ugh. I really want to go the FOSS route, but something is holding me back. The first time was VMWare on SUSE. Is there something now? Do I actually have a reason not to go back to Linux? Doesn’t Entourage do the same thing as Outlook? Doesn’t Mono run the .NET Framework? Isn’t MySQL and Postgres or even Oracle better than SQL Server 2005?

All these questions which need answering. One that I know I can answer though, is that Windows Vista is garbage. I liked XP. I liked 2000. I even liked Windows 95 and 98. I don’t like Vista. It feels “wrong” somehow, like Windows Millennium Edition did.