Today is a momentus day, a day that has created fundamental change in how I work, a day that finally arrived after years of growing frustration and aggravation. A day to do something I did not have time for but knew I just had to do. A day when living with the pain was no longer easier than the financial cost, time, and headaches of addressing the aggravation.
Today I left the Dark Side. I switched from a PC to a Mac.
I have owned PC's since 1988 and most recently have moved through a series of Dell's about every two years. I've set my friends and family up with similar systems. I've dealt with the driver compatibility problems, the connection issues, and the expected degradation of performance over time that no defrag or optimization routine can seem to address. I bought my most recent Dell only a few months ago, a souped up XPS M1330. All the extra memory, fast drives, high resolution screen, fingerprint reader... you name it, it had it. As expected the problems started to occur, first when I installed a scanner, then with increasingly slow wireless connection times, and over the past couple weeks several instances of the "blue screen of death." That's when I decided I needed to change. Coincidentally Apple announced their new fasters laptops. The planets aligned.
I was worried. What about all my software? Well, the new Mac's can run them if desired, although I've decided to make a clean break and buy new software. What about file transfer? Piece of cake over my home network. How in the world do you survive without a right mouse button? I'm still learning to deal with that.
But within an hour of turning on my new Mac laptop I realized it was a new day. On a PC setting up my networked wireless printer was a pain. I literally had to navigate through the network to find the printer, install it using a CD, allow the laptop to use it, and then spend an hour debugging why the scan and fax features wouldn't work.
When I asked my new Mac to find the printer it simply said "HP 7200 series found and installed." Done.
It just works.