Ok, maybe that title will generate a bit of search traffic.
It’s always the little things that you forget when you switch platforms. I’m writing down the very first things I notice after using my new desktop PC for a few days:

• Ugh to the coil whine. The Mac Mini was silent. May have to swap mobos to get rid of it. That sucks.
• I no longer have to wait 10 seconds fro my mini to sync up with my monitor.
• English fonts for the most part look better on Windows.
• Japanese fonts tend to look better on Mac. The font substitution scheme is simpler and works better on the Mac (and it works more uniformly across different programs), though I just discovered that Windows has a pretty sophisticated scheme called font-linking. Also “Meiryo UI” is apparently the hot new Win7 Japanese font which seems pretty decent.
• 16G of RAM is AWESOME. Never have to swap. It’s stupid that the mini basically prevents me from doing this.
• Actually, in retrospect, using laptop-class hardware for my desktop is basically just dumb. It costs more, and is limited in all respects. The only benefit is power savings, but I bet iMacs do pretty well at that too.
• I like the windows IME system better. Working keyboard shortcuts by default. Not laggy.
• Cygwin still sucks to set up. But it’s ok once it’s there. Still feels less nativ-y than OSX’s unix. Found some paper that seems to confirm at least perf-wise that’s true. There are lots of weird Unix variants on windows: cygwin, mingw, sua. Somewhat frustrating that the effort is not unified. Still ok though, I think I only basically need SSH.
• Yay for my fleet of freeware programs: imgburn, speedfan, cpu-z, paint.net, resophnotes, mpc, eac, lightshot. All high quality stuff.
• Yay for sane alt-tab
• I mostly live in a browser
• Windows Live Essentials Movie Make is passable. iMovie still seems easier, but I should be able to make silly Kaio videos with this too. Importing big source material is kinda slow though.
• SC2 is awesome on a real computer(tm)
• Flash definitely works better in Windows.
• More stuff on OSX is default color managed, though I don’t think my work MBP handles the large Dell monitor at work particularly well. Doesn’t matter cuz I have a srgb monitor, but it perhaps limits my choices going forward.
• If I didn’t know how to build PC’s, I’d probably buy a mac. Even now, mac’s have advantage of lots of people using a small set of hardware combinations, you’re more likely to find info about problems online.
• Task Manager > activity monitor
• Mac desktop still looks generally better than Windows one. But in Win7 it’s pretty close. Still not a huge fan of Aero. Hope they change that in Windows 8.
• Chrome is faster on windows. Dunno why. It just is.
• Responsiveness of desktop is also better on windows. OSX just feels laggy. Maybe it’s the mini. More apparent when you switch back and forth.
• Not as many fun things to easily hack on. Maybe Hackers don’t use windows?