I am a Mac, finally

Published on July 12, 2008 by , in Business, English, Gadgets, Technology

I am not a PC or Microsoft hater, not at all, never been. But Vista made me really angry, every day a little bit more. First, the freakin' nag screen all the time when you want to install or do something Vista thinks you need to be an administrator for. Ok, you can turn this off but then you always have the security shield thingy in the taskbar flashing an alarming red and white icon at you. Next, performance. Dude, is Vista slow. Got a brand new HP notebook last year and after I was done installing all my software the thing would hardly move. Sometimes I had to wait 15 minutes to wake up from hibernate (the PC not me, although I wished I could hibernate, too, and just wake up at the same time). Awesome, could have booted 10 servers in that time. Or try to copy 300 MB files from one folder to another and have some fun with the "14 hours and 10 minutes left " message that you want to ignore but when, 2 minutes later, it's at 14 hours and 8 minutes you start getting concerned. The things I found great about Vista as opposed to XP were pretty much all the bits and pieces where Vista feeled more "Mac OS X"-like, quite absurd. But I thought I need it and so I planed to stick with it. Just bought the Laptop a year ago, can't buy a new one now, can I?

Then Vista played it’s final trick on me. One night, it decided to finally install Service Pack 1 after having denied installation for weeks. When I tried to turn it on in the morning a black DOS-like screen welcomed me saying "ntoskrnl.exe: Windows failed to load because a required file is missing or corrupt". Thank you, Vista, for this wonderful day! I spent hours to find out what's going on. Apparently, in early Service Packs a bunch of corrupt files were distributed. Vista recovery console couldn't solve it, I even tried to delete all corrupt files and copied "old versions" back into the directories but the repair routine constantly overwrote my attempts. Sure, if I had made a proper back-up that might have worked but I didn't so it wouldn't. I finally had to re-install and because I wanted to keep as many settings as possible I installed Vista again. But this was only to get back to work quickly and to recover as much as possible. I also made a plan.

Somewhere between the 7th and 11th attempt to repair Vista I visited apple.com. There, I found a 20" iMac, refurbished for $1099, only a click away. I know, it's only a small step for mankind but one giant leap for me. Finally, I made the decision to switch not only as a private user (I did that 4 years ago) but also professionally: I am a Mac.

Bye bye PC, so long, I sing the "Vista Blues".