Tech post: SJPL should make the Switch

Of all things technology related, I'm most impressed by the products that come from Apple. iPods are cool, but their real magnum opus is the Mac. I've owned PCs in the past. I use them at work and school. In nearly every environment I've used a Windows PC in, there's been some kind of problem. In high school, there were two computer labs I worked in: one with PCs, the other with Macs. The PC lab had problems once a week. The Mac one, never. Sometimes all the PCs crashed at once! At work, the problems are far less frequent, but the classic PC annoyances show up from time to time. The compromised speed, blue screens of death, frozen applications... they show up once in a while.

At home, I worked for the PCs more than they worked for me. First we started off with a Dell. It sounded good. It's prebuilt by professionals, includes a monitor, and comes preloaded with Windows XP! Neat-o! Our dreams of becoming true citizens of the Silicon Valley were finally being realized! It's too bad that the Dell was just a nightmare that wouldn't end. It wasn't Dell's fault. The thing was what we asked for... physically. Tower and monitor were all good, but the problem was that Windows XP part. No-one told us we had to build a fortress of firewalls and spyware blockers for the computer to just be normal. Just NORMAL! By the time I learned the swiss cheese structure of Windows XP, it was too late. A myriad of spyware programs were displayed the first time I ran an anti-spyware application. As bad as computer viruses, the spyware was lodged deep in the computer's intangible innards, spreading virtual molasses onto the CPU's floating point operations. The computer became uselessly slow if it wasn't displaying the blue screen of death. My only option, my computer literate buddy informed me, was to reinstall Windows. The process was something I'd become very familiar with. I had to lose everything to start over; I had to format the hard drive. All my work was gone. The essays, the drawings, the TV pilot, the UFO footage, the plans for my perpetual energy machine, all gone forever. But hey, at least I could start anew! No dice though. Even though I prepared a small army of anti-virus and anti-spyware apps immediately after the reinstall, they were no match for the onslaught of spam the interweb threw at it.

So, my friend told me, I needed to build my own PC for better results. This brought up even more hassles. I had to pick out the computer's case, sound card, video card, hard drive, power supply, secondary fans, CPU, CD drives, monitor... oh, it was more trouble than it was worth. Then came putting the damn thing together. It's easy now, but it's still annoying. Still not there yet. The sound card wouldn't play sounds from all the programs. So I had to go back and buy a compatible one! Then the same problems as before started showing up again. The speed was compromised after running the computer for some time. The whole system would crash occasionally. Incompatibility and driver issues were endless. Unfortunately, I had to go to all that trouble to realize the real problem was Windows. That buggy, archaic, and exposing operating system would no longer cause me a great many woes.

I made The Switch to Apple after that. It was like recovering from an illness I had all my life. I bought the iMac, and it's awesome. The whole thing, monitor and computer, is in a single unit. Hooking it up was easy, the initial startup was easy, and using it is just a joy. All the problems I had with PCs are a gone. The performance is never compromised. I can leave the computer on for a week and it's always speedy. The operating system is intuitive and clean. I learned to use it much more quickly than I learned Windows. The threat of spyware and viruses is almost nonexistent. I've never installed any protective software on the iMac and it's always running perfectly.

The Windows PCs at work certainly don't give me the trouble my own did, but they act up from time to time. It probably won't ever happen, but a San Jose Switched to Macs would be one step towards utopia.

"My favorite old PC game was called "Getting the darn thing to work". That's when you work on a project for four hours and your machine dumps all of your work, then you make calls to 5 different vendors finding ANY human's company who will take responsibility for one driver, one piece of hardware or one application.

Then I got a Mac, and we all know these kinds of games (like many other games) are not available on the Mac." -Doug Tennapel