I have found myself, in the past few summer months, strung up in between operating systems. Early in the summer, my MacBook Pro’s motherboard gave up the ghost, qhite suddenly, during an otherwise peaceful lunchtime. I eventually got a new one, and rebuilt the system easily with my fine external backup disk.

But in the meantime, that is, between the time of the motherboard’s death and the advent of the new MacBook Pro, which was a few days since the Apple store was closed for remodeling, I did a radical, reckless crazy thing. I got a netbook. After all, I can’t be without my keyboard and Intertubes for very long. It is a cheap little machine that runs XP very slowly. It and its friend, the fancier netbook, which is sitting on the radiator down the hall, which runs Vista Home Basic a little more quickly than the first netbook does XP have surprised me. Windows doesn’t suck as much as I remembered.

In the intervening months, it has only blown up on me once (the XP version, not Vista). I have been in the OS X camp for so long that I am surprised at the lack of Imminent Doom hanging over me and my miniature attempts to use Windows. I was so surprised, as a matter of fact, that on Monday, I surprised myself even further by getting a properly-sized and running laptop running Vista. It has a nice big screen and hasn’t given me the Blue Screen of Death yet, not once. And it has a piece of hardware embedded near the keyboard that I have yet to see on a MacBook: a fingerprint reader. I can log in with my fingerprint.

You can forget your passwords and I can forget my passwords, but you can’t forget your fingerprint. Well, if you can, you have more to worry about than logging into your laptop.

There: I have set myself up for opprobrium from both “sides” of the operating system wars, ignoring of course all of the Linux people who are mad regardless of which of those two systems I like better.

One thing I am certain of: fighting about operating systems is damned silly.