I’m writing this from my Lenovo Thinkpad.
Adrian one of my sales guys said his laptop had already slowed down which surprised me.
This surprised me because I BOUGHT him his laptop less than one month ago. And he’s already saying it’s slowed down.
He’s got a Lenovo Thinkpad like me.
The spec all things considered is pretty decent – it’s got 16MB ram and this means (based upon having a Macbook Pro with the same ram) that it zips along.
I’ve just checked the hard drive space and that admittedly seems small (120 GB more or less).
It’s SSD though and if you keep everything basically on the cloud and delete regularly you’ll be fine.
But in fairness, if you DON’T do that then I can see storage becoming an issue relatively quickly.
However – I bought it for Adrian with the intention of it being a work machine so I’m hopeful that doesn’t happen.
And as I’ve got the same laptop as him (literally identical) – I’ve decided to work on my Windows machine to figure out how to optimize the damn thing.
Part of that is also realizing (as I’ve got my wireless Macbook Keyboard plugged in) that I don’t know how to take a damn screenshot.
Lots of things to learn.
That’s also the reason (the time NOW is 6.23 am) that I haven’t taken a snap of the time and date (9th July 2021).
So with all of this preamble in mind – today’s post is about why I’m switching from my Macbook to Windows for a week.
I’ll tell you what it isn’t.
It isn’t about affordability – as I’ve already got a Macbook (AND a Chromebook – more on that later).
It isn’t about convenience because switching ISN’T convenient (and I can’t say which type of machine is more convenient until I spend enough time on the Windows machine).
And it isn’t about me having a preference for Windows as I’ve been a happy Macbook user for years now.
So – you ask the question then – what is it?
Well….it’s to…..
Wait for it…
[convertful id=”197358″]
Waaaaaait for it (lol)!
It’s to help make my TEAM more productive!
I’m assuming that’s not what you were expecting as a reason to spend a week working on my Lenovo Thinkpad lol.
Let me dig into this some more >>>
The world is still much more Windows than it is Macbook led. Also, Windows machines are much more affordable and cost-effective than Macbooks.
For these reasons – unsurprisingly – given we’re a remote team and one of the ways I bring in talent is through our placement programme – is that the majority (probably 75%) of the team are Windows users.
In combination with this – I’m someone who enjoys productivity.
And specifically by this – I mean optimizing the machine I’m working on to make sure I’ve got it working as effectively as possible for my needs.
To that end I’ve (historically) spent some time figuring out how to optimize my Macbook pro.
That means whenever I set up for the day – I’ve got a suite of tools, Macbook preferences, and apps that allow me to be at my most productive. (Although writing this reminds me that I need to re-review this process again for my Macbook because it’s been a long while since I saw what else I could do to speed up my Mac).
Now, I’ve shared all of these optimisations with my team – and I’ve seen the massive value it’s added when coming to making the team faster.
Some people seem to get their machine up and running – but don’t share any of their insights into the little tips and tricks they employ to get the most out of their machine.
From distant memory (in my PRE-Macbook days many moons ago) – I used to actually be a PC user and loved it. This is because of how much you can customize an effectively much more open-source platform (that naturally does come with other challenges though) than you can Mac.
So – with all of this in mind – if I can successfully use a Windows machine for a week I’ll be able to (hopefully) make some progress when it comes to being able to figure out a wholesale range of tips and tricks that I can then feedback to the team.
And this is where the true value comes in – that I can institute change across the whole team JUST from the basis of optimizing my windows machine.
I’ll (once I’ve figured it out) write a tactical blog on all of the optimizations I discover – as soon as I discover them 🙂
