I should be on commission

I am not, by any means, an expert on computers. I know enough to get by, certainly, and I’ve usually been able to fix whatever software or hardware problem I’ve encountered through a combination of persistence, searching with Google and shouting profanities until I have a breakthrough.

Friends and relatives who encounter problems with their own computers and gadgets will often ask me for help and I’m happy to give it. Seeing as they are typically PC users, more often than not it comes down to updating or installing anti-spyware and anti-virus software and generally spring cleaning their hard drive. In the last year, however, when asked for advice on any computer related issue I have given only one response: “Get a Mac”.

Since switching last year I have never looked back and have become, as so many do, a walking endorsement for Apple. My dad took one look at my iMac and subsequently went out and bought a MacBook instead of replacing his (faulty, naturally) desktop PC. A friend asked me to help him pick out a new laptop at the start of the year: I converted him to the cause in about two minutes and the next day he went to the Apple store on Regent Street and also bought a MacBook instead of wasting money on some ugly and inferior piece of shit from Currys or wherever.

I still have a laptop that runs Windows but I only use it because it’s there, it’s portable and, if I need to log in to my work’s network, it has to be on a computer running Microsoft’s ubiquitous and irritating operating system. If it weren’t for that, I would have sold it / given it away / started using it as a dinner tray a long time ago and bought a MacBook myself.

I have had my iMac for nearly a year now and, in that time, it has never:

• Crashed. Not once. Not ever.
• Slowed down to a halt for no discernible reason
• Refused to acknowledge any piece of hardware I plug into it
• Been infected with a virus (no surprise there) and therefore has never:
• Required a system scan to look for malicious software, hogging the system’s resources while it does so and taking about two hours to complete
• Started running unwanted programs without my permission, thus taking about half an hour to boot up
• Needed to scan for spyware
• Frozen instead of shutting down, requiring it to be unplugged from the mains
• Made me feel like picking it up and throwing it out of the window in sheer rage and contempt

Any one of which is likely to happen with the average PC on any given day and that is why I never intend to buy one of the cursed things again. I have converted to Macs with an almost religious zeal. The Apple Store is my church and Steve Jobs is god.

Join me.

"It just works"…. Mmm, I just wish I understood how

So I’ve bought a Mac. A 20″ Intel iMac to be precise. I’m not totally sure what made me decide to take the plunge. Maybe it was the adverts (although I really don’t think so). It certainly wasn’t this article by Charlie Brooker. No, it was just finally losing my patience with PCs. I’ve had my fair share of them and it seems that for every hour of use you get from a PC, you spend another hour tinkering with the damn thing to get it to work: scanning for viruses or spyware, or defragging the hard drive, or downloading yet another ton load of Windows security updates, or restarting it for the third time in an hour because somebody walked past it and sneezed, or trying to get your wireless router to talk to it until, eventually, there’s just a weird clicking noise coming from inside and it stops working altogether. Enough! So, needing a new desktop computer and not fancying more of the same, I thought I’d see what these Apple devotees have been going on about.

Well, it looks great, and I’m really enjoying using it but by Christ it’s confusing. Having been reared on Microsoft and knowing my way around the Windows environment as well as most people, suddenly making the change to an entirely different operating system has proven to be a bit daunting. No right click on the mouse? No CTRL short cuts? No Start bar menu system? Where is everything? What’s the short cut to copy and paste, or italicise or make something bold? Confusing. All of a sudden I feel like an old woman using a computer for the first time, terrified that if I touch anything an air-raid siren is going to go off and the whole machine will just melt in front of my eyes. Even blogging proved a challenge: usually I write in Word, then past it all into Blogger. Obviously cannot do that. Then it turns out that Blogger doesn’t work properly on Safari (the default browser on a Mac) either, so I’ve gone scurrying back to Firefox (having first downloaded the PC version in error, of course).

This is going to keep me busy for a while….