I have had enough with Windows. I have owned three different PCs over the last decade, running Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP, and a defining feature of all of these for me has been that with a PC there is always something that's not quite right.
Let's illustrate this with an example or two; just the first few that come to mind:
My old Windows-XP laptop currently has an idiosyncrasy whereby if I close the lid whilst it is running it goes into hibernate mode, which is fine, that's what it's supposed to do, but when the lid is re-opened for some inexplicable reason it comes back out of hibernate mode and then immediately shuts down. I cannot for the life of me work out why, let alone try to correct it.
Switching off the login screen, which I really don't need on a computer only I use proved extremely challenging, as the options that control is aren't very well labelled and getting the combination that would not bring up a dialogue box asking me to sign in was a true exercise in trial and error. I finally managed to make the accursed box go away on startup, however any time the computer comes back out of standby mode it still appears and asks me for a password.
My laptop also seems to think it has a US rather than a UK keyboard, which most noteably swaps the " and @, and makes typing the £ symbol impossible. After a couple of hours of trying to figure out how to correct this little quirk, I gave up and decided to live with it.
My PC at work has an intereting little tick in that whenever a USB stick is plugged into it the stick is recognised but it's impossible to access it. Due to way Windows XP assigns drive letters, and the number of network drives on my work computer, windows wants to assign the stick the same letter as an existing drive, and this conflict prevents the stick from becoming visible on the desktop. In order to gain access to the USB stick I need to go into the disk manager application, which Microsoft seem to delight in changing the name, location and format of with every update, and manually change the stick's drive letter to one that isn't in use.
I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point. It's 101 little things like the above that are ever present in a PC that have brought me to this point of complete dissilusionment with anything that's running Windows.
So, what does a Mac do that a Windows PC doesn't?
Well, to put it simply, it works.
Somehow a Mac simply manages to not have any of these issues, or at least has a far, far fewer number of them. I have formed this opinion from playing with my Dad's discarded Mac this weekend, which he recently replaced with a newer version.
This is a Mac Mini, a desktop computer in a teeny tiny case. This is the whole package, and the idea is that it will work happily with whatever monitor, speakers and USB hardware you already have, keeping down the costs of replacing an old computer. The one I have inherrited has displaced the tower of my old Dell desktop, plugging into my existing flat screen monitor and speakers. All I needed was a USB keyboard and mouse, so at the weekend I treated myself to one of Apple's very nice flat keyboards and a new webcam.
All I had to do was plug it all in, switch it on, and it worked perfectly first time! At 4 years old one would expect it to have developed all manner of ideosyncracies, but so far anything that I have come across that I've not been completely happy with has been so incredibly easy to find in the options and change.
I think I'm going to become hooked, and I'm already trying to work out how soon I can get myself an up-to-date Mac Mini, or maybe one of the new MacBooks.
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