Bye bye Vista - and good riddance!

Well I’ve finally done it, I have had an epiphany, cast off the Microsoft shackles and thrown my lot in with Apple MacIntosh. I’ve been running a Macbook for a while, a few months ago I needed to replace my laptop, not having been that impressed with Windows Vista I decided to try the Mac experience and I have to admit to quickly becoming a convert, everything about it seemed to ooze a quality lacking on the Windows PC’s, from operating system to build quality.

I’m not an early adopter, I didn’t own a mobile phone until 2000 when my a change in my work routine meant I was spending a lot of time on the road, and the nature of my work also changed meaning I was on call a lot of the time. Not being a fan of video games (as they used to be called) I saw little point in owning a personal computer of any kind, the prospect of Pong, Pacman and the like could never tear me away from my stereo or the prospect of a good book, however in 1995 I was offered an Amstrad PCW dirt cheap which I bought and quickly discovered that I’d acquired an obsolete piece of plastic glass and wires that was unloved by most, the betamax of the computer world, the Setanta Sports of technology. Software was virtually non-existant for the PCW but it did come with a powerful if basic word processing package called Locoscript 2 (I never did know what happened to Locoscript 1). Soon I became an addicted diarist, there was no way to connect the thing up to the internet and blogs were unheard of at the time so my writings were strictly personal and private, but very prolific. Soon I managed to get hold of a couple of other basic programs and I gradually started to use the PCW for spreadsheets and a bit of design work making quite crude posters for friends who had a band.

This carried on until 1999 when it went pop, my sister had an old laptop with docking station that was surplus to her requirements, I joined the PC revolution - about 10 years late! One of the things I had realized was that anything I had done on the PCW was lost, only printed sheets remained because the floppy discs that I had stored data on were not only unreadable on a PC, they didn’t even fit into it, the PCW having a unique three inch disc rather than the more common three and a half inch disc. So I had to adapt, I also lost Locoscript and had to start working in Word, on the old Windows 3.1 operating system.

My first taste of Microsoft lasted about 4 months before the laptop packed in, my partner however had a desktop PC with the revolutionary Windows 95! I also started using a PC on a regular basis for work so I soon became computer savvy, and before long I could do most things I needed to. Digital photography gave me further need to use the magic box, and the extra bits such as external hard drives to store the vast amount of images I was building up with my new found interest in wildlife photography. Windows Millennium came and went, Windows 2000 seemed to work well but didn’t last long before being replaced by Windows XP that seemed to be a dumbing down of the process which Microsoft marketed as making it more “user friendly”, hmm.... This of course gave way to the abomination that is Windows Vista, a product I could swear about for 20 minutes without once repeating myself, a clunky, counter intuitive affair that made it virtually impossible to use a PC for anything other than sending an email, surfing the net or playing games. It seemed that the needs of anyone who did not want to join in Facebook, MySpace or Twitter was ignored as the “features” of Vista appeared to be targeted at 15 year olds who spent every bit of spare time they had in their bedroom - not wanking or writing excruciatingly self indulgent poetry as any self respecting adolescent of my era would, but in front of a computer screen multi-tasking to the nth degree, playing 3 games, having conversations with 4 people and checking out the latest Death Metal tracks. All ths whl txtn thr m8s on thr mbls.

My final straw came when attempting to connect 2 photographs to an email, I wrote the mail, clicked on “attach”, found the files I wanted to send, highlighted and pressed return only to get the message “You do not have sufficient privileges to do this action”. I calmly turned the PC off, got in my car, drove to the Apple Store Norwich and returned with a brand spanking new iMac.

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just a shallow knee-jerk over-reaction to just one incident, it was the final happening in a catalogue of events that saw me lose two batches of very important photographs which, despite the Microsoft assurances that it couldn’t happen, were wiped from one of my hard drives as I attempted to back them up. New software and the attentions of our IT expert at the office failed to find them. It almost happened with my digitised music too, fortunately this was securely copied in several places so despite Bill Gates best efforts I can still listen to Death Metal should the desire take me. Constant security alerts, constant permission and privileges issues that meant that actually turning the thing on became an ordeal.

The Mac however seems like a calm oasis, a pleasure to work with, ok some things are different but are soon learnt, it doesn’t treat me as if I’m an idiot, and it lets me do what I want to do without asking me 5 times if I’m sure I want to continue before not letting me do it, and, so far, has not managed to lose any important files or changed the location of other at its own whim. It doesn’t take it 10 minutes to switch on or off, I don’t have to spend 30 minutes a week downloading the latest virus definitions (which won’t work) and its clean aluminum design looks stylish and elegant compared to the cheap looking black plastic box it has replaced. It connects better to my phone and mp3 player (I suppose it really ought to - they are both from the Apple family) and also to the various hard drives and router I use that took me days to sort out with the PC. I suppose these are all reasons why you often hear of people who switch from PC to Mac but never vice-versa, I wish I’d done it years ago.

Oh how we laughed!

After being welcomed to the British Speedway Forum, "the forum that doesn't get censored", one of my first posts is removed for "personal abuse"!

It was in response to a post that claimed King's Lynn speedway gave you, "Big crowds, fast race track, best teams in the 2nd tier of British Speedway, battling it out. Lush surroundings. Great, Mike Bennett presentation. All for a bargain price of £12... Mouth watering, isnt it?"

I quoted the bit about the fool Bennett and commented that it was an oxymoron about a moron, I looked back a little later to see that "personal abuse" had been removed.

I now think Mike Bennett is just a little bit less of a moron than the humourless moderator who believes that is "personal abuse".

He's still a dick however, and always will be...