it’s mac toniiiight

I have always tried to stay out of the Mac vs. PC debate, or at least to stay flexible… I grew up using a Mac, used them in school and at work on and off over the years, they’re great, whatever – but I also like to play a lot of games, and for that you pretty much need a PC. There was also (traditionally) the higher cost of Macs to reckon with. Also, I got quite annoyed at Macintosh’s condescending “Dude look our computer is so totally cute like a happy peaceful rainbow made of kittens and ducklings and flower petals… and by the way we’ve discussed it over lattes and there’s no way in hell you’re smart enough to handle TWO mouse buttons” design philosophy – I like fiddling with things, I didn’t mind having to tinker with my PC’s autoexec.bat and config.sys files and reboot it 15 times to get it to do anything. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Thinking back I’m not sure all those all-night reboot-a-thons in college just to get the stupid thing to play Doom or Day of the Tentacle were all that fun.

But I wanted to play games and for me that was the bottom line. I have no problem using Macs whenever I get the chance, but I always figured when it came time to buy my own computers for personal use, I’d get a PC. That all changed a couple months ago, on the magical day that Kim shrieked like an eel at me until I finally agreed to consider getting a MacBook. I considered it. I compared prices, I read a lot – and it seemed to me that I could buy a new MacBook and boot it up in Windows for not much more than the price I’d end up sinking into a reasonably good Dell or whatever. And since it’d be a fully functioning Mac, I’d sort of be getting two computers for the price of one. I thought it all sounded too good to be true, but that’s exactly what happened and I don’t think I’ve spent a spare moment away from this thing since the moment I got it. I’ve been playing games on the Windows side and doing multimedia, music, video chat type stuff on the Mac side. It’s worked perfectly.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is to report that I think I’ve finally gotten fed up with the PC. I’m still going to use it to play games on, but man this OS is a piece of crap. Over the last two months I’ve had about a dozen crashes – even though Windows supposedly doesn’t freeze and crash as much as it used to – and I’ve had to re-install, remove, scan, tweak and troubleshoot almost constantly. Earlier today I ran a scan and I had well over a hundred spyware files and registry entries on the PC partition of my hard drive. And I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is the free spyware scanning program I used, by the way... seems pretty good.

By comparison, how many problems have I had when booted up in the Mac OS? Not a single one.

Nothing.

No programs have ever frozen up. Nothing has ever hijacked my browser. The computer has never suddenly turned itself off. I’ll repeat for emphasis: NOT A SINGLE THING has gone wrong or required extensive troubleshooting when I’ve been using the Mac OS. Compare that with the hell I’m going through right now trying to delete the kybrdff_15 spyware file (at least I think it is – whatever it is, it won’t let me delete it and it’s pissing me off) from my PC drive. And the idiotic Microsoft “help” information which is about as helpful as that talking paperclip from Word. Good God almighty in heaven above I hate that freaking paperclip. I’ll still boot up in Windows occasionally to play games, but otherwise, forget it. Game over, man. Nuke the site from orbit.