Windows 7, You Make Me Glad I Bought A Mac

I really hope someone from Microsoft reads this blog post.

Last year I invested in my first mac ever. It was a macbook pro laptop and after much deliberation I finally got the guts up and pulled the trigger and forked over the bucks for a mac. They are a bit more expensive and I was worried about the cost of converting my software over to mac but I was ready. Here is why I went mac and how looking at Windows 7 made me fall in love with Apple all over again.

About every year I blow at least a week of my life formatting my PCs. Many people do this and they do it for a number of reasons: they like to start anew with a fresh system; they need their Windows system to perform well again and Windows performance seems to degrade over time; their computer crashes and they have to start all over. Now, I am a computer programmer and while you might imagine that means I tinker with my computer and tweak it to death causing it to die annually, I don't actually do that. I try to keep it very clean and yet each year Windows just seems to take a fatal nose-dive and I have to reinstall the operating system and all of my software again.

This whole effort of reinstalling means I lose time and as we all know time is money. In 2008 I had to reformat my system twice! Before you start thinking I own some sad old machine that should be retired, it is an HP AMD64 dual core machine with 6 GB of RAM and about 1 TB of hard drive space with dual digital monitors and nearly 1GB of video RAM, so I should be good to go. Needless to say I started doing the math. If the rumors were true about Apple computers being fairly maintenance free then I would save enough time each year to nearly purchase a new Mac computer annually rather than invest that time/money into fixing Microsoft Windows. So, starting with a laptop seemed to be the right next move toward a switch.

After co-existing with Windows Vista for over a year and having the Mac book pro laptop as long, the crash happened again. At this point I didn't need to do the math again. The main computer took the final crash and I was ready to go all-mac-all-the-time. So I bought a 24” iMac and never looked back... until the new buzz about Windows 7 came out!?

Windows 7: it loads quickly, no more Vista crashes, no more constant warning message interruptions, easier user interface, tons of usability enhancements... did I go to the iMac too quickly? Should I have been more patient?

Then I hear about the free Windows 7 Release Candidate downloadable from Microsoft. It is at this time that I fall in love with my Mac all over again.

Like Charlie Brown depending on Lucy to hold the football one more time in hopes that she won't pull it away YET AGAIN just before he kicks it, I decide to waste some bandwidth and download Windows 7.

First off, you can't easily download Windows 7 in anything but Windows Internet Explorer. The Windows 7 download crashes Firefox. Next up, I have to load up my Windows Vista in Parallels on my Mac just so I can fire-up IE and download Windows 7. 3 hours later I have Windows 7 on a DVD and I am read to install.

Here is where my investment in Apple pays off and vindicates me. After three attempts to install Windows 7 which is interrupted 3 times with the installer crashing my computer, I finally couldn't boot the machine anymore. Just so you don't panic, I am not attempting to install Windows 7 on my Mac. I am installing Windows 7 on my crashed Vista computer. It was even a completely fresh installation, new partition on the hard drive and everything! To no avail could I get Windows 7 installed and running. What a piece of... crap!

Needless to say I decided immediately to sit down on my Mac and write out this blog. Ah, my beautiful, flawless and painless Mac. It runs, it plays, it works... alas it does not crash!

So Windows is no more. On the upside, I happened to burn the Windows 7 installer on a reWritable DVD so I didn't even waste the DVD. I am now about to install Kubuntu Linux on that PC and be done with it. Never again I tell you. Never again!