Switching Back

Well, the day has finally come, (as was inevitable), when I switched back from the evils of the low quality Windows world to the higher quality, more satisfying world of the Mac. Windows is definitely feeling no love this year, as so many people seem to be making the switch from Windows to Macs or Linux. Can't say as I blame them after last week.

We'd been planning on a return to the Mac platform a little later this year and apparently the Windows machine overheard us and decided to commit sepuku last Thursday, rather than be replaced down the road. That was pretty much the last straw for us. It was an inconvenience to have to move our plans up by a couple of months but, it was a necessity. Windows has few options for fixing problems and most seem to involve erasing ones hard drive and starting afresh. Seeing as there was data I needed on said hard drive I was reticent to do that.

Fortunately, I already had one older Mac Powerbook and a Firewire case so I hooked up the tanked Windows hard drive and 'lo and behold the data was there at my fingertips. Windows couldn't find anything, but my 6 year old Mac Powerbook (running OS X with 1 GB of RAM) immediately saw everything. Unfortunately, it did not have the drive capacity to recover and store the data. The new 20" iMac I was sent out to acquire does have that capacity.

So, now I've been spending the last week reacquiring programs, retrieving data, relearning keyboard shortcuts and reacquainting myself with the vagaries of a full sized Mac and a newer version of the Mac OS X. So far I am very satisfied with the experience. NeoOffice looks to be as good a program suite as M$ Office and the price is right. I love the Macs Dashboard function and Widgets, having the weather radar at the touch of a button is just cool. Firefox, Thunderbird and my wifes copy of Beer Alchemy are all working well. Add in the fact that it's just a darned pretty machine with a huge cool factor and I feel pretty good about things now.

All in all, it's nice to be back into a more user friendly computing environment and, other than the availability of games it's hard to see why we ever migrated away from what is clearly a better and more friendly platform. Shoot, this new system is even going to let me experiment with Unix via its BSD core and the terminal and I could, (if I were masochistic enough) even run Windows again. There's a new external drive mounted for backups (I had wisely purchased an extended warranty on the drive when we had the Windows machine assembled), my trackball is hooked up and all my data is now retrieved and safe in a new home. Life is better.

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iMac, Switching, Apple, Windows