I'm back to dual-booting, because I couldn't get VMWare to install on my Fedora installation, and I didn't want to revert to another Linux distro. So, I put Windows XP back on this machine, and reinstalled Windows Live OneCare, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Messenger and Desktop Mail, and then forgot about it for a while. My wife's computer, meanwhile, was starting to give her troubles, so I began performing surgery on it in order for her to be able to keep up with her shop.

While I was doing this, she took the opportunity to use my computer - which is faster than hers and has more RAM. So, she installed The Sims 2, a game we're both very fond of, and finally got to see all the cool cut scenes that the game has available only if you've got high-powered video cards with lots of memory to play in. I do believe that has made her somewhat reluctant to go back to her repaired machine, and I predict I will see her playing that game on my PC on many occasions in the future...

While I had Windows up today, I took the opportunity to do a little comparison of features - last night, I ripped a couple of CDs in Fedora using Sound Juicer, and it seemed a little slow to me. The files were saved in the ogg format, so they could be played by any of my audio programs in Linux, and each CD took about 15 minutes to rip. I seemed to remember that Media Player ripped quite a bit faster than that, so I booted up in Windows and ripped an old CD to MP3 format - high-quality, MP3 format, at that - and it was done in about a minute.

Score a big win for Windows.

So, games and mp3-ripping are two tasks that Windows definitely does better than Linux - you wanna prove me wrong?

As usual, more to come on My Windows Experiment - and for the flip side, see My Linux Experiment