Well, it’s been another longer-than-I-hoped for lapse in blog postings. The reason is that January has proved to be a month of monumental change - and no, I’m not talking about President Obama’s inauguration. I actually took the plunge and ... switched from PC to Mac.

I know what some of you may be thinking: what’s the big deal? They’re all computers in the end, aren’t they? The World Wide Web looks pretty much the same no matter what browser you’re looking at, right? Well, I’ll be the first to say that life would be much simpler if this were true, but it is not. 

First of all, let me explain the reasons for my change in allegiances. I’ve been a loyal Dell laptop user for four years, and a PC user for nearly ten. I liked Windows for its versatility, the fact that just about every application ever created can be run on it. I liked the fact that you can get a loaded-up, customized Dell Latitude for a pretty reasonable price. The only thing I didn’t like was that my Dell laptops had a life expectancy of roughly two years. My first Latitude (“Icarus I”) ran smoothly for two years and then catastrophically self-imploded, taking many of my files down with it (and before you ask, yes, I had much of it backed up on CDs, but no, I didn’t have the whole thing safely reproduced on an external hard drive). I grieved, and moved on to another Latitude (“Icarus II”). After two years, it began to act a little ... weird. By then I had a Western Digital external hard drive backing up all the important stuff, but my frustration was growing with the two year lifespan trend. Granted, my laptops work hard - I’m working on them constantly, haul them back and forth between home and work, and I drag them everywhere with me when I travel. But still ...!

It was time to consider a change. I wanted something a little more durable. I was also desperate to avoid a mandatory “upgrade” to the “Vista Experience.” These two considerations (not the Mac vs. PC commercials featuring John Hodgman as the PC and Justin Long as the Mac, though I do find them clever) are what reluctantly drove me away from Dell and into the arms of Apple. 

My new MacBook Pro (“Artemis”) has an aluminum unibody, is largely recyclable, extremely fast, and a track record of lasting for four or five years, maybe longer. The glass track pad is a dream to use and pleasant to the touch. It also has a back-lit keyboard, which I admit is one feature that honestly made me swoon. There are other bonuses as well: Macs are immune to most viruses, they don’t crash as frequently, and, if you want it to, they can run Microsoft Windows by, in essence, splitting their brain in half. 

The transition has not been universally smooth. For one thing, although Apple’s iWork suite of applications can seamlessly take up my documents originally created with Microsoft Office software, many of the other applications I purchased for use on my Dells do not translate to Apple. The realization that I could not take my Corel Paint Shop Pro drawing software with me (unless I want to split Artemis’s brain to run Windows) came as a heavy blow. I could not even buy a Mac OS version to download - Corel simply does not have a version of PSP for Macs. I’m trying out a similar offering from Adobe, but it means re-learning how to use a drawing program, something that takes considerable time to master. Another thing is that Safari, the Mac internet browser, is very picky about how it reads HTML code. I was shocked and dismayed when I opened up the Definitive Guide’s homepage - which always looked fine in Internet Explorer - to find that it looked terrible in Safari. It has taken much sifting through the code to find the little errors and variations that IE tolerated but Safari would not to make it presentable again. Having learned this lesson the hard way, I apologize profusely to anyone who has been trying to view my website in Safari or Mozilla FireFox right along and been confronted with a sloppy presentation. Honestly, I had no idea there was a problem.

But I think I have a handle on all of this now. It’s taken awhile, and I still have a lot to do (for instance, re-loading all my internet bookmarks), but at this point I think I can honestly say that I now count myself among other happy Mac converts. And that is change I can believe in.