Goodbye Windows – hello Mac

I’ve been a Microsoft Windows user since Windows 3.1.

I remember the day I upgraded to Windows 95 and it felt like going from the stone age to the iron age – the Start Menu seemed like a great idea and it looked fantastic – my world was changed forever.

I’ve been using Windows ever since and as soon as the latest version Windows 7 was released, I upgraded from the previous incarnation that dreadful resource hog Vista I installed it and started using it day-to-day for business and pleasure.

Initially I had liked widows 7, I was impressed by some of the cool animations and effects, I liked the icons and there seemed like a few decent improvements over the XP/Vista experience. Windows 7 was quite snappy and everything appeared to work rather well. Of course, as is to be expected of Windows, things degrade over time. It’s slowed down a lot, various pieces of Microsoft software crash from time to time and the “Do you want to perform the following action?” dialog that pops up often from UAC just gets annoying and seems like a poor solution to spyware and viruses after a while. Frankly, it became a huge disappointment.

While attending the a conference in London I noticed a lot of attendees used Macs. My friend who I was attending with, has been trying to get me to buy a Mac for years and had a MacBook with him. As he started showing me the software you get with it I was blown away. It was absolutely clear that a lot of the new GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Win7 is directly copied from Mac OS X – except it makes more sense in the Mac as all of the GUI conforms to the same rules.

Straight out of the box there’s a bunch of useful software to let you create music, video, photo books and a host of other things you have to pay for with Windows. I use exchange server and the MAC immediately connected.

I looked at the Mac-v-PC adverts and forum reviews and they started to make sense. Windows machines are work-orientated and pretty dull on the whole, whereas Macs seemed more fun and creative at heart.

That time has come and quite frankly, I’ll never buy another PC. Everything they say about Macs is true – “it just works”. You get so used to having to continually tweak Windows to get things to work correctly, from graphics cards to the registry to a hundred other things. Not so on the Mac. One of the first things I did was connect to my home wireless network which was a simple case of picking it from a list, entering my WEP key and that was it. To connect to the local wi-fi on my Mac took perhaps 10 seconds start to finish and I was surfing the web. The connection has never dropped since. Within seconds the MAC had then picked up that I had a network printer and two network storage devices and without any issues it had (itself) connected with all these selecting the correct driver etc. . Interestingly the MAC was clever enough to make all the decisions itself.