Steady on.. I’m not confessing anything of a deviant nature (that’s all still secret) but I’ve been increasingly stressed with windows vista both on my office machine and my laptop at home and I won’t even go into the two PCs I’ve got upstairs at home that won’t work properly! I seem to specialise in wrecking windows systems.

I usually mange to get about one year of use from a laptop but probably the last 2 months of that will be stress filled. I can’t be doing with the hassle of getting everything off a laptop, then reformatting, reinstalling windows then hunting the drivers down and putting everything back on every 12 months so I usually end up buying a new one and copying documents over and starting again however my current system hasn’t even lasted a year, it’s been about 9 months I think and giving me errors for the last 6 weeks of that and driving me mad, the image to the right has been a daily occurrence for me and check out the temperature in Valencia and Portugal compared to Sheffield as if the errors weren’t enough bad news to cope with

I spent a week looking at new laptops but realised it’s actually windows which sucks for me and how I use it, the laptops are fine in themselves, I’ve had Compaq’s, Viao’s and Toshiba’s, my current laptop is a Toshiba Tecra M9 and it’s been good in itself and I like it but the common denominator is windows and it sucks, for me at least.

After a week of laptop hunting I decided I was sick enough of spending too much time each month and at least one week per year fighting with windows errors so then I figured I’d take a punt on a mac, I’ve had a G5 in the office and not used it for more than 5 minutes despite it looking very cool in the corner! but my laptop lasting just around 8 months before persistent errors set in means I spent 2 hours in the mac shop at meadowhall on Sunday and left with a shiny 17″ MacBook pro.

It’s all Duncan Popham’s fault after saying in a4u that their entire operation was mac based and he wouldn’t swap for any money, up until then I’d figured macs were mainly for designers and those that don’t have to work too hard for a living but knowing Duncan is an agency/PPC guy with years of industry experience I figured if he says they are cool for this kind of work then they are cool! (thanks Duncan :))

Well I parted with the best part of £2.5k after getting a 5% company discount and left the store hoping not to get mugged in the car park, I got my shiny new MacBook home, switched it on, spent 2 minutes sorting my wireless network, downloaded some updates and it was sat there all ready to rock, no traumas, no errors (not that a windows system would have by now.. having said that I once bought a brand new desktop that couldn’t even find it’s own drives lol) updated and ready to use within about 30 minutes of opening the box.

I downloaded AdWords editor, works fine, downloaded Opera browser, works fine, MSN Messenger ..same again.. all good so far, I know a couple of programs I use won’t run on a Mac so I’ll be downloading either Parallels or VMware to run those.

I opened up the mac mail program and put my settings in, then spent 30 minutes or so trying to get it to work, I’m with Orange broadband at home and mail is a pain normally so I ended up using a paid for SMTP service earlier this year but even then it wouldn’t work for a while.

I was feeling smug at sorting that out and then my “mighty mouse” died, £49 for a wireless mouse that looks more like some futuristic sex toy is a bit much, then to have it die within an hour of first using it isn’t inspiring, everything works except for the actual tracking of the mouse, buttons and scroll button work fine.. it just wouldn’t move the damn cursor, not to worry it was swapped without incident Yesterday.

I have to say the macbook pro is one sweet machine, it auto dims the screen and backlights the keyboard depending on the ambient light, the speakers are awesome, graphics just jaw dropping and it’s uber fast to use, I can’t wait to get fireworks and photoshop on it and crack a few memory heavy programs open at the same time to see how the 4gb of ram handles it. The 17″ screen is big but easy to make full use of, I had a good 17″ Compaq about 4 years ago that I got in the Texas for a couple of thousand dollars which was a bargain at the time, JBL speakers nice machine, wieghed about six kilos lol but was great to use, I’m happy to say the macbook is much lighter!

I manged 5 hours use off the first battery charge doing all the set up etc. then playing with it although I’m sure this will diminish with time (then again a new battery is in store and about £80) but I’m used to being told 3/4 hours and getting 2.5 then eventually 1.5 at best with windows laptops.

It’s been a very long 9 year journey to get to choosing a mac and I can honestly say I’ve never had a single PC (or even handheld device) in my 9 years of being online that didn’t make me want to punch the screen through on it innumerable times (I actually did with a handheld thing once I was so annoyed) so the swap to a mac couldn’t come soon enough (if I don’t get on with this then I’ll be on some Linux hardcore system that does virtually nothing except mail, browse and run spreadsheets lol)

So far the main trauma has been that my iPhone wouldn’t fetch mail since I synched to mobile me mac mail thingy, it was asking for server certificates, mail worked fine on the macbook but not the iPhone.. gah I’m awesome.. I could screw up an abacus! anyway luckily it seemed to sort itself out when synching for the 5th time today.

I tried to get on with the mac mail client and iwork office software but couldn’t do with the spreadsheet so I bought office for the mac for £90, works fine and is closer to what I’m used to interface wise although I will have a tinker with iwork when I have more time, it’s a case of getting up to speed pronto.

Looking back I’ve realised that I have actually felt ill at times with all the hassle of software and hardware not working correctly and having client work to do to deadlines etc. so I’m hoping to soon be one of the happy mac guys who just tuts, smiles and shakes his head when listening to the woes of windows users.