I bought my first Mac in 1984. Apart from a few years during the 1990s I’ve used nothing else for my main work. I love Macs, though I am less fond of Apple, and given the control freak noises emanating from that company of late I grow less and less fond by the day.

But let me be frank. I’m no acolyte. If something better comes along I’m going to use it. Tomorrow I set off for Venice to put the finishing touches to my new book <em>The Plague Doctor</em>. I had thought that this final, final read through and revise would happen on an iPad. Not so. They’re not in the UK yet and, as we now know, they’re no good for book revision, for the moment anyway.

I needed some alternative because my ancient MacBook Air has slowed to a crawl. So I’ll be taking along something new and inexpensive. A Windows laptop which is as much a surprise to me as it is to you, honest. It’s a good idea to reappraise your tools of the trade from time to time. I’ve been doing that of late and it strikes me that Windows is about to become a real contender in the creative writing stakes again. Over the next few days I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s look at Windows itself.

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A brief history of Windows…
<ul>
	<li><em>Pre-1995: Windows 3 and all that stuff. </em>Best forgotten.</li>
	<li><em>Windows 95: </em>buggy, slow, over-complicated bad Mac OS rip-off.</li>
	<li><em>Windows Me: </em>95 with a few bits taken out and some more stuffed in. Still buggy and slow.</li>
	<li><em>Windows NT: </em>great if your hardware worked with it. Useless if not.</li>
	<li><em>Windows XP: </em>NT for the rest of us, solid, useful and clever in the beginning, gradually atrophying with age, but still the best Windows of the early years.</li>
	<li><em>Windows Vista: </em>what happens when someone gives computer programmers free Listerine but forgets to tell them not to swallow.</li>
	<li><em>Windows 7…. </em>Ah….</li>
</ul>
[caption id="attachment_3928" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The new revision system: more on the hardware tomorrow"]<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/revise1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-3928" title="revise" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/revise1.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="225"></a>[/caption]

I got Windows 7 when I bought a cheap Asus netbook for some location work in Seville. The netbook ran for eight hours between charges. It never crashed. It was a pleasure to use. It cost £250 and paid its way in a week.

Windows is Windows. It will never be as elegant as the Mac. Frankly I’m at an age where I no longer <em>care</em> about elegance though. I want something that works and is good value. And Windows 7 delivers on both those counts. Yes, there are complexities, but I basically use very modest software in very simple ways – word processing, web, mail, a bit of photography, and keeping a journal. This is dead easy on Windows 7.

Here was a real killer too. One of the biggest things that drove me from Microsoft in the first place was the need for additional software to handle security and virus issues. Norton and McAfee drove me nuts. They slowed down the computer, they nagged, and they cost money. And while they may still come as trials on many new PCs you don’t need them any more.

Microsoft have their <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/" target="_blank">own free security essentials package</a>, which does a good job according to the computer press. And does it unobtrusively. Put that on your PC and you can forget about it.

Windows 7 with security essentials is reasonably simple, secure, and seems to run on relatively modest PCs without squawking (I am not trying to edit movies here – if you are, seek better advice elsewhere). As far as I’m concerned it works and it does some things rather better than Macs (I found it a sight quicker setting up two PCs to talk to each other than a couple of Macs to be honest – they spotted each other straight away and understood what was wanted).

If you run a blog it also comes with the free blog editor Live Writer which is, quite simply, the best of its kind I’ve ever come across, even better than Mac’s Ecto, which you have to pay for. Call me happy there – which is why you’re reading this from Live Writer on Windows 7 64-bit running Boot Camp on my Mac mini so I can choose between the two.

The big problem: most of my working day during the book development phase is spent in Scrivener. Scrivener doesn’t run on Windows yet, though there’s a rumour there will be a version for it some day. So with my present working method there’s still no way I could abandon the Mac if I wanted too.

It is a sight easier to work with the two than it used to be though. Evernote is just as happy on Windows as it is on the Mac, since it’s web based. So is Remember the Milk, my reminder service. My backup app SugarSync works on both too so I can mirror the same folder on my Mac to directories on any Windows machine and keep them all in sync. All the pain of keeping files up to date across several computers and systems has suddenly gone.

The biggest obstacles to writing and revision on Windows remains Microsoft Office 2007, one of the ugliest and most baffling pieces of software known to mankind, with its hideous blue background and intrusively counter-intuitive ribbon.

I knew I could never ever revise a book with Office 2007. It’s almost as bad as Office 2007 on the Mac. But then I saw there was a &nbsp;<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx" target="_blank">beta for Word 2010 on the web</a>. Worth a try, I thought, in spite of <a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/revise1.jpg2010/04/09/the-next-microsoft-word-a-peek/" target="_blank">a product page that makes it sound utterly horrendous.</a> Never believe what Microsoft tell you in their marketing. Sometimes they undersell themselves rotten.

A quick run of Word 2010 on my netbook made me think… hmmm…. this could work. But you can’t revise a 125k word book on a ten-inch netbook screen. I needed some hardware. Let me deal with that tomorrow then go on to tell you about Word 2010 on Wednesday.