My very first computer was an Apple ][e way back when I was 8. When our family got the computer (nearly as old as I was) I had no clue how to use it. We had a box full of unlabeled disks, wires, connectors etc. that my uncle had given us. I figured out some basics, like getting a sweet Knight game to work where I could joust, shoot arrows, and other Knightly activities. After the Apple we finally got a REAL computer when I was 10, a modern Gateway Pentium I 75mhz with a CD Rom!!! We spent the next 2 nights on the phone with tech support trying to figure out how to launch applications from the CD drive. My gateway was a POS and multiple parts on it died regularly. Gateway would ship the new part, give me instructions on how to replace it, then I would send back the old one. Through this process I began to learn all the parts inside the computer.

About a year later (and with Gateway replacing the entire PC to a 100mhz!) me and my new found friend Sebastian, took the Gateway, an old PC I had acquired, and some new parts we bought at a local PC store and spend the next 48 hours in my basement assembling 2 good working computers. It took so long, and into a third day, because the new huge 20gig hard drive we got had errors in it, as did the replacement one we picked up the next day. The third one worked and I had officially built my first computers. Since then I have been interested in PC building and tech.

I have been a long time PC user for 14 years. I have built 50-75 systems and repaired countless others. I have a degree in Information Science and Technology and I have a computer consulting business Ctrl Tech. Today I did the unspeakable, I switched to a Mac.



Frankly, I was tired of windows. I do advanced programing, web development, video, audio, and photo work on my PC. But 80% of the time I do what everyone does, brows the web, listen to music, watch movies, use standard office apps. I have a legit, FREE, copy of Vista. I installed it for a month, tried really hard to like it. It's just a huge POS. When my good friend Todd when to buy a new laptop to replace his dieing 5year old HP I just could not recommend anything out there because it all had vista on it. He decided it was worth trying a Mac as we had used them on campus before. Worst case, he would pay a restocking fee and get a different PC. After a week of getting to know the new OS etc he loves it and wont go back to a PC again. I helped him set up the laptop and took a tour around it (pre leopard) I was just releaved with how easy it was to do basic tasks. I'm not entirely sure that a Mac is faster than a windows PC, I think that the OSX tricks you into not realizing things are taking as long as they really are.

Now that the latest version of the MacBook Pro is out, with the multi-touch and twice as much video ram, I have sold my old dell laptop (xps m1210) and decided to switch to Mac. I will be writing a full review of the Mac when I get it next week. Stay tuned and find out what a long time Windows user thinks of Apples latest offerings.