Snow Leopard makes me switch to Windows XP

Last week was full of excite­ment by Macin­tosh fans as Apple released the new update to the OSX oper­at­ing sys­tem — Snow Leo­pard.

I was inter­ested and took a look at the buzz and the busi­ness side of the release in a post over at the Future Shop Techb­log.

Then I rolled up my sleeves and installed the suck­er on our Mac Mini, which served as our Kit­chen Computer.

Easy. Flaw­less. I love it when Things Just Work^™. Apple seems to have it down pat.

Here’s where XP replaces OSX 
Now, I say the Mac Mini served, past tense, as I also took this week­end as an oppor­tun­ity to replace the Mini with an ASRock Ion 330, run­ning Win­dows XP (for the time being).

The reas­on for the replace­ment? The Mac is just too much com­puter to be releg­ated to the roll of just a media centre. It’s just too cap­able a machine to be locked in the kit­chen play­ing tunes with Songbird.

Ah, so that’s it
So, our plan is to keep the ASRock run­ning XP, though we may move over to Ubuntu if we need to. It’s a pretty sweet box too.

1. Intel^® Atom™ 330 (Dual-Core CPU)
2. NVIDIA^® ION™ graph­ics processor
3. Small (2.5L)
4. Silent (acous­tic below 26 dB)
5. Energy Star 5.0 level (Low power consumption)

I believe it’s cer­ti­fied for Vista and Win7, but I need a light OS. Some of the soft­ware I plan to install on it over the next few weeks:

• Log­MeIn Hama­chi VPN
• Open Office
• Song­bird (done)
• Xbox Media Cen­ter (XBMC)

Of course, Fire­fox, Comodo Fire­wall and AVG Anti­Vir­us are already installed 😉

Well, what am I miss­ing? This is a light duty, kit­chen com­puter, so I *think* I’ve got all the bases covered…but maybe not. What would *you* install on it?

As for the Mac Mini, well, my wife has plans for it 😉