My name is David Irvine, and I’m a ’switcher’….

Up until last year I was a fully fledged PC (Windows only) user. I worked with it all day in my job as an IT Systems Analyst/Support Engineer and still do, helping to maintain a Microsoft Windows 2003 server environment (approx 200 servers) and a couple of thousand XP desktops in a number of locations in different countries. And what a pain in the rear it is. So much so that I wouldn’t even want to see a computer when I came home at night, despite the fact I had quite a few around the house. They always seem, to me anyway, to be just too much work. I found myself spending time doing things with them that I didn’t intend to do, wasting time generally and always searching for software that would be easy to use (having spent all day trying to resolve problems for other people the last thing you want to do when you get home is find some of your own).

They always just seemed, well, bothersome. Adding CD/DVD Writers, changing hard-drives and graphics cards, working on the PC instead of actually using it. I’m gonna try hard not to make this a Microsoft Windows bashing post, that’s not the intention but I now firmly believe in different horses for different courses, and while Microsoft are great at business solutions, to be honest, It’s never really done it for me as a user.

So after many years of resisting and putting up with my brother slagging me off for using PC’s (which he called BC’s due the fact that he believed they were well out of date) and Amiga’s (or Amoeba’s as referred to them) I jumped ship.

“My name is David Irvine, and I’m a ’switcher’”. Feels good coming out about it now.

Last year I splashed out and bought myself an Apple Macbook. I didn’t feel the need to go for the big cahuna Macbook Pro, just the bog standard, white, 13″ Macbook. What a revelation. From taking it out of the lovely packaging, powering it up in the back seat of the car on the way back to work (accompanied by lots of “oohs”, “aahhs” and curses from the other occupants) to sitting here now blogging this, I can honestly say it is one of the best purchases I have ever made. I LOVE it. It has made every other computer I own redundant, including my self built music workstation. I still tinker with ‘the others’ and even built myself a Vista Media Centre recently but their numbers are reducing as I give them away.

I’m not going to say I’ve had no problems with the Macbook (wrote another post on a display problem I had, which my wife still smirks at if I mention, I just know she did something and is hiding it) and initially encountered a couple of random shutdowns. But that’s it. There will probably be more in the future, but a couple of problems in a year? I had a couple of problems every sitting with the BC, sorry, the PC. I use it for work (Music School), and play; building websites, surfing, ripping, skyping, blogging, music, writing, photos, home movies, and using one of the built in voices to tell my daughter she really needs to go to bed (and she actually talks back to it, brilliant). And initially, as expected, it took me a while getting used to the mac way of doing things (What? NO program files, system32, add/remove programs, Ctrl/Alt/Delete?). And not entirely happy with some of Apples own programs requiring a .mac account., but that’s ok because it made me look for other cool, easy to use programs. I’ll write about this in another post, but generally, the future looks bright. And fun. I’m still learning and as time goes by I’l doubtless find other things I’m not happy with but generally I am one happy camper.

So I’ve decided to add another category in the blog for those who are contemplating ’switching’, it won’t be anything technical or grande, just reports of me having fun and loving my mac. So look out for posts on my favourite software, working habits, and findings of good and bad things with my macbook in future.

This entry was posted on 09/08/2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Switchers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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