This will be a very brief update on the progress of my Windows foray: I just want to say, I'm on the train, and I'm trying to write this, but every 10-15 minutes a popup appears from the Wireless Network Connection do-dad on my "Taskbar." Unbenounced to me (I am not a touch typist, and need to look at the keyboard when I type), this takes over my mouse focus, and anything I type after that point misses the document and flies off somwehere into the ether. To be fair, the Mac does this from time to time too, and it's equally annoying on that platform. (No, that was not a train pun.) But the Mac does it less frequently, and more obviously, such that I rarely lose whole paragraphs of text I thought I was typing. So add one more to the count of things I have to turn off or on before I can be at peace with my Dell, and another to the list of nice things about the Mac. I have to say, the Mac is really well thought out and configured, straight out of the box.
And that, my friends, is why design matters.
And for the record, I have now discovered yet another program for accessing wireless networks. That makes a total of three -- count 'em, three -- programs vying for control of my wireless card: Quickset, by Dell; Intel PROSet/Wireless, by Intel; and the Wireless Internet Connection Control Panel built into Microsoft Windows XP. WTF?