Ok, now I’ve done it.
I am a Mac guy. There’s no question about it. My job, my sensibilities, and the enjoyment I get from computers all points me down the road to Cupertino. Unfortunately sometimes the rest of the world decides to stand in the way of that path.
Now to be honest, I haven’t always used Macs. From the time my dad first started bringing computers home from the office when I was in grammar school—remember the Compaq luggable?—all the way through high school I used various DOS computers to do my school work. However, when I went off to college I bought my first computer and it was a Macintosh LCII. I’d used them in the computer lab in high school and they seemed so much cooler.
In college I always had a Macintosh sitting on my desk in my dorm, but I used a mixture of Macs, Windows, DOS, and Unix at my work-study job in the campus computing center. Later when I entered into the “real world” of life after college and got a job working on post-production sound for film, I found that a large percentage of Hollywood makes use of Macs.
There was a period of time when I was working that I didn’t have a lot of spare money to throw around and I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with computers, so I built my own Windows machines for a while. They were much less expensive than my beloved Macs and since Apple was caught in the doldrums of System 8, I only felt occasional pangs of abandonment guilt.
It wasn’t until a few year later when I started working for some other companies when I saw the coolness that was System 9 on Blue and White G3s and Graphite G4s that the longing became unbearable and I had to return to the fold. Step back into the warm, embracing arms of Steve Jobs’ goodness. And that’s where I’ve remained until yesterday. Actually it’s where I will remain, period. Unfortunately like I said, sometimes the rest of the world gets in the way.
I’ve started working on a project that pretty much requires me to run Windows. I fought against it as much as I could but not even my copy of Virtual PC could fill the gap of an ugly grey box sitting on floor of my apartment. So after talking it over with some people, a bit of internet research and a lot of soul-searching, I stopped by a local “build-your-computer”-type store and picked up a new motherboard, processor, some RAM and an OEM copy of Windows XP.
Last night after work I dusted off the last of my FrankenPCs, an unwieldy 500MHz Celeron running Windows 98—first edition—in the largest case you’ve ever seen, and ripped the guts out of it. By 2:30 in the morning I had an AMD Athlon XP 2800 nestled in the socket of a new ASUS motherboard, a 120GB second hard drive removed from one of my Macs reformatted (of course only after moving 80GB of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix bootleg concert FLACs to the safety of an external Firewire drive) and Windows XP installed.
I crawled into bed and lay snug while dreams of DDR RAM danced through my head. At least until 5:30 when the alarm went off so I could get a couple more hours of work in before I had to go back to the office for a temp dub. The update to SP2 went down without a hitch and I installed the 5 CDs of material that I need for the project. Unfortunately when I went to fire up the application for the first time it crapped out on me when the first of the 3D graphics were drawn on the screen.
It was a crushing blow to spend all those hours and be so close to the finish line and have my hopes dashed. Suddenly I started to remember why I enjoy Macs so much more. Of course I’ve had programs crash on me, or strange bugs have popped up that I’ve had to diagnose. But it’s been a fairly rare occurrence. Maybe I’ve had good luck or maybe I just know more about how to head off trouble from Apple’s computers, but firing up a new system in the world of Macintosh is a pleasurable experience. On the other hand, my travels in the Gatesian realms usually leave me feeling like I’ve been mugged by a street gang “saying hello” to foreigners.
Thankfully by 7:30, right around the time I was giving careful consideration to seppuku, I was forced to pull myself together and get in the shower or there was no way I was going to make it into the office at 8am. And in the hours since, I’ve had time to reflect on the joys of Windows system construction and do some research on the ASUS and NVIDIA websites. I’m crossing my fingers that it’s just an issue of old video drivers being used in Windows XP SP2. Tonight I’ll find out when I go back to fight some Redmond dragons.
