Almost a year ago, I did a piece on the stuff I use in my day-to-day life, computing-wise. Because people seemed to enjoy it and because quite a bit has changed in the last eleven months, I thought I’d write up a quick article on what I’d changed, with a special emphasis on how I’ve made many different computers and operating systems play nicely with one another. Buckle up!

The Hardware

The only computer I was using a year ago that I’m still using today is my work computer, a 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 Enterprise. At home, I traded in my three-year-old Dell Vostro 1400, which had a 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM, for a much faster Dell Latitude E6400 with a 2.53 GHz Core i5 and 4GB RAM. Both systems ran Windows 7 Ultimate, but the new Latitude’s extra RAM means I can switch to the 64-bit version, and its onboard TPM chip means I can take advantage of Bitlocker’s drive encryption features without having to use a clunky USB key.

Also new is a 2006 20″ iMac with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo and 2GB of RAM – the specs are modest by today’s standards, but it was a steal, and it runs OS X 10.6 and the 32-bit version Windows 7 Home Premium ably.

Working Together

I’ve got a lot of different OSes going at once, and while the mixture doesn’t usually cause any trouble, it certainly can.

Mike wrote earlier this week that he was using almost exclusively Microsoft products because of their easy interoperability, and that’s true in some respects, but Windows and OS X actually play more nicely now than they have at any point in their long history together. With a little forethought, it’s possible to get everything working together pretty smoothly.

Printing

Printer sharing was one of the biggest problems I had between my systems – with great effort, I got all of the driver issues worked out, and then the printer broke just a year after we bought it.

I wanted our next printer to work without all of the fuss – we bought an HP Deskjet 3050 all-in-one with wireless capability and connected it to our wireless network, and that was pretty much it. We could connect to the printer from all of our OSes and install it as if it were a local printer, which eliminated all of the driver conflicts and the need to have the printer tethered to any one computer. It was smooth and it was easy and it solved one of my bigger interoperability complaints.

File Sharing

Most of my file sharing these days, though, is handled with Dropbox, a great little cloud storage service that will automatically sync anything in a given folder with their servers and also with as many of your computers as you want. It’s great to be able to work on a document or file, save it, shut the computer off, go home, and then fire up a different computer running a different operating system and have everything be there automatically.

For what I need, it’s as seamless as Homegroup sharing, and the fact that it’s also backed up online gives me extra peace of mind. Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free, but offers some paid options for people with more files, and those of you with friends who also want Dropbox can share a handy link just like this one to get extra space from referrals. Everyone wins!

Programs

I wanted to make special mention of just how well Office 2010 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac work together – after years of messed up Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations, I can finally create a file using the Windows program and have confidence that it will work in the Mac one, and vice versa. It’s really great work on Microsoft’s part.

Where possible, I try to use cross-platform programs to save myself grief. Google Chrome’s sync feature keeps my bookmarks and preferences smoothly synced between my Windows computers and my Macs, and iTunes (which my iPhone locks me into) is a not-great-but-usually-functional music player that works well enough.

Audacity is still a great cross-platform audio editor, despite a lack of meaningful updates in the last couple of years. FileZilla handles FTP duties, and uTorrent is a great, lightweight BitTorrent client that works well on both architectures. Skype also deserves honorable mention for keeping me in touch with many of my far-off friends.

There are only a few things on each OS that I really miss when I’m in the other one – when I’m on Windows, I miss the excellent Sparrow mail client, which really helps me manage my multiple Gmail accounts, and the Twitter client for Mac, which is both simpler and more elegant than the massive flow of information that something like TweetDeck shoves down your throat.

In OS X, I miss Aero Snap most of all – there are programs like Cinch out there that look to approximate Snap’s functionality, but the laundry list of caveats and the cost usually prevents me from actually making the plunge. I also miss Windows’ Remote Desktop client – Microsoft has one available for Mac, but it doesn’t support Aero and the performance isn’t quite as good.

Conclusions

My computing life has become a lot more mixed in the last year, but that doesn’t have to be a problem unless you make it a problem. Interoperability between OS X and Windows is better than it’s been at any point in the past, and it’s very possible to make the platforms work with one another, rather than picking a platform, planting your fanboy flag, and trashing anyone who thinks differently than you do.