Bio:

I am 21 year old male, I work at Radio Shack, I do freelance computer work for locals, and I am a Mac user currently residing in Charlottesville, VA and used Windows for a while but now I only use Windows on the POS at work which is a POS in more ways than one. I own a 350 MHz G4 Tower Yikes!, a Dual 2 GHz G5, a PowerBook 165c, a PowerBook 180c, a PowerBook Duo 230, a PowerBook 3400c, a PowerBook 1 GHz TiBook, a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz, a 2G iPod, a 5G iPod, an iPhone, and a Newton. I also may be getting an old iMac for my tele in my living room and owned a 400 MHz G4 PowerBook TiBook but sold it to a friend of mine in order to purchase the 1 GHz PowerBook TiBook plus they needed it for work as their ThinkPad had just about had it. (It actually had it two months later).

I have been using computers since I was 4 using my friends Commodore Amiga but I used that mainly for return of the Jedi. I loved Apple from an early age with the Apple II and GS (my elementary school even had a GS computer lab) but I was blown away by the Mac. It was quick and easy and just a wonderful experience over all. I still have found memories of the first "Kid Pix" (I made an early power point like presentation complete with voice recording with it), running other games and software out of "At Ease". I had hours of fun with Macs and I really thought they were the future of computing despite the Grainy Video on the Packard Bell the school also had and the computer class with Windows 3.1 I just though the Macs were better. I would ask my parents for a computer but my family was poor and we couldn't afford a Mac. My parents then divorced and the money that could have gone to a computer went to my mum's rent, a new TV, and furniture. We went on for some time and after waiting years to finally get a Mac I gave up on just Macs I would take anything. Anything was the key because when I finally got a computer it wasn't a Mac but a used home built Windows 95 machine given to my mum by some of her friends that had just upgraded to the latest and greatest. I was still more keen on getting a Mac but it didn't matter I was just so Skyed to get anything that the Windows 95 Machine would be more than enough. It was also the late 90's and at the time Mac's looked less and less appealing as I was only familiar with the pre-Jobs return Apple. I was quick to explore the computer and after spending some time I grew to like Windows, I liked the software it could run and the ability to expand and customise the interface and since I had more personal time with Windows then I had ever with Mac OS due to the relatively controlled atmosphere of school I became more proficient with Windows than I had ever been at Mac OS. Not too long later the iMac came out and started touting the wonders of the internet which due to the slow modem and old computer I had yet to experience outside of school. I started asking for the internet and an upgrade from what we had but this all fell on deaf ears as it was all too expensive. When summer ended I went back to school to find that my school had just invested in new iMacs, I was finally first introduced to the new iMac but it wasn't love at first sight, I did think they were cool but I wasn't convinced about Apple's turn around and as I used the hockey puck mouse with no right clicking and had to trade places with other classmates to use my diskettes and zip disk that were in the USB external drive I began to believe that Apple wasn't really as good as I remembered because it all seemed like old tech re-badged with new colours with no grasp of how things worked in late '98 and their new identity was based more off of style than its substance. That sure seemed to be confirmed when one of the iMacs had an electrical fire and since I was ignorant of OS X I had no incentive to move from my free Windows computer to a Mac. Even my friends at the time were down on Apple many were big gamers and since the Mac Platform had nearly abandoned the gaming side of things while Steve was away they all had great new Windows Machines to blow stuff up with. So when my family first bought a computer even though my mother thought about buying a iMac and was willing to pay for one after someone recommended one to her I dismissed that and asked that we get a Windows computer that was on sale in an advert from Office Depot. The computer was a Windows 98 Emachines that only cost $99 with a subscription to MSN (this was not the one that was a rip-off iMac, I thought that was just ridiculous). A year and a half later my father would by a similar one with a faster CPU, 17" monitor, HP 480 printer, and the just released Windows ME and a subscription to CompuServe. I had no trouble with either one and really had a blast playing some of the great games out at that time and browsing the late 90's and early 00's internet but on that second year of the first emachines life I started to have trouble. It started making a horrible noise and then the computer would not start correctly I would actually have to hold down the power button down and unplug and re-plug in my power cable to boot it. I blamed this on the cheap nature of the Emachines product so I didn't let this bother me. Then came the first problem my father had his rebates were not coming. He was fairly angry about it and went down to Circuit City to complain about the trouble. I accompanied him and I there I saw the new redesigned iMac and it really was a great change. It had the the pro mouse a clear optical mouse, and the pro keyboard a translucent black keyboard and the iMac itself was just great looking with the translucent grey colour which gave it a real professional look that I had not scene from Apple in a while. The icing on the cake was OS X which had been running on it. It looked like what Apple should have had 2 years prior but I still felt it was too late Apple just wasn't going to do it, however this would be my first doubt of Microsoft and if Windows was really going in the right direction. Then less than a month later Windows update single handed killed the Modem driver on the computer but since I was able to use the Windows back up software to restore the computer I didn't let that kill my affair with Windows but it was another dagger damning Microsoft but I still liked the philosophy of being able to build or add what I want to a computer which Macs still had some trouble with. After a little time passed I had let the event go and had saved quite a bit of money so started looking at laptops after all the emachines were faulty and I even had a new problem with the diskette drive button and I wanted a portable computer. I settled on a Dell Latitude CPi I bought used for $550 but I was shocked to find out it had no networking or modem. This simply maid no sense as it was supposed to come equipped with one but I wanted to get on the net quick so I bought a PC card modem and was done with that. I loved it at first and played quite many Super Nintendo games on it but then I noticed a crack in the plastic. It was right by the hinge and I thought I had just broken my computer but I was able to pull up on the screen and it seemed to open up like normal so I put it to the back of my mind. This happened during the time of the Apple switch campaign and I started to think about Macs for the first time in a long time and while deep down I felt like I would really want one I even remember a dream I had where my dad picked up an iMac and I ended up really loving it but I dismissed it and I think I started to develop denial over the whole switch idea. I tried to forget about that and I then started looking into high speed internet access and found a deal that would make it cheaper than our dial-up service. Showing the cost difference there was little need to convince my mum about getting that so we got DSL through Sprint. I showed the same advert to my dad but he lived outside of the service area. I really loved the new things I could do over the internet. I could finally watch streaming video and watched hours of music videos off of "Launch Cast" but this could only be done on the desktop as they had only supplied the one Network card and that was a PCI card. Then I had a hinge snap on my Dell and the screen had a blue line streak through it. My conclusion from this was simply the reason my computers have been so troublesome was because I was buying cheap or used computers. So I pulled together every cent I had and bought the highest end Toshiba laptop I could with 17" screen, Windows Media Centre (Mark 1 basically), and a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT CPU and the new Geforce graphics card. I felt like I had bought the best computer on the market I would laugh at others with simple little G4's running at 1.5 GHz, ha I would say but the joke was on me because that turned out to be the most faulty computer I have ever owned. The first two months were awesome just speed and games and everything I could ever want I even brought the computer with me to school and watched recorded TV shows. Then I discovered my first bit of trouble. I was with my robotics group an organisation known as CARobotics and I was showing off to the others the awesome computer but then one of the guys wanted to watch some of the new web show Red vs. Blue a parody of the Video game Halo that he had on a CD. Opened the drive and inserted the CD only to find that the disk wouldn't read. I spent 12 minutes tinkering with it and finally got the disk to work but we watched it and then played some games on my computer and we were just so completely keen on it though. Even though I still loved the computer I knew this was going to be troublesome. The next week I called Toshiba and a nice guy answered and said they would gladly fix the drive but I would have to ship my whole computer to Richmond, VA and would have to wait two weeks to get it back. I would have taken advantage then but the Emachines at my mum's house finally had one too many bsd's and passed away May '03. I continued to used my Toshiba for months with this fault and it until one day late summer I caught my headphone jack in a swinging chair made of rope at my dads house and that ripped the whole headphone jack right out of my computer. This was unacceptable I looked inside the flap and found just the chinciest design for a headphone jack I have ever scene. There was little to nothing holding the jack down and it was ripped out with just the stubby rubber leading from the end of the lead from the jack. I put it back and it seemed to work again. From there things went down hill at least in my relationship with Windows but Macs were a different story as I was going to use them lots very soon. That fall would be my last with Windows and I was using more than ever I brought my laptop to class with me that fall and that's when I started to get windows errors at random and the whole vertical hold started to spaz out at random I would have to flex the computer to make the video come back in. This school year I was going to join the video production class and I was going to be using Macs the most I have in 3 to 5 years. I was a bit sceptical if Macs had improved much especially at first since many were still running classic late '03 but the eMacs were running Mac OS 10.3.5 and I was blown away by an operating system for the first time in a decade. It was so quick and had so many useful features. I had to admit I was wishing Windows had those features and was jealous of the Mac OS for the first time since I personally owned a computer. I finally spent some serious time with a mac and was pleasantly surprised. I started to even modify Windows to look and operate like OS X. I actually got it kind of close but far from being as responsive then in late that winter the headphone jack fell out. I had two options either to fix it as the warranty didn't cover that or by a used iPod. I chose the iPod as I was so disillusioned with Microsoft and Windows especially the two hours a week just spent on maintenance. I bought a 2nd Gen iPod which had everything except for the four pin firewire adapter which I had to get for $8 after the fact but it worked great I was convinced my next computer was going to be a Mac. I tried to convince my mum that it would be good for me to get one since it would be good for video editing but even the Mac Mini was going to be too much for us as I had spent so much on that laptop. I took up an internship in the first part of the summer doing IT work for the University of Virginia and was fed up with Windows computers by the end of it. I didn't want anything to do with them and I went to France and spent a month without a computer other than once a week checking my email. Spending that time without a computer I realised how much time I was wasting on maintenance and basic things that I should never have to do but back in the states I was stuck with the Windows computer then one day as I was trying to show someone a "Flash" animation from last year's video production class the computer died. The Hard Drive made a loud noise and then I got a Blue Screen Kernel Panic. I tried to reboot but I had a SMART failure and it could not get into Windows. It would have been nice if the SMART failure could have alerted me before the whole hard drive crashed but it didn't matter I had started to hate computers which if you had talked to me a year ago you would have thought would have been impossible. Now a computer that was near top absolute top end had a dead hard drive, a dead dvd burner, a broken headphone jack, graphics that would just jump around at random and was turned into just a large glowing paperweight just one week out of warranty. I was fed up with Windows somehow I had everything die on a computer in just one year and a week. Windows itself had become increasing unusable and I had to spend loads of time just fixing the computer to make it work and I didn't have enough patience left in me. It was time to get a Mac. I had to look on ebay while at school as my home computer was dead. I sneaked out of class a few times to check on auctions but after a little effort I found the perfect computer for my much more slim-lined budget. I bought a 5 year old Yikes! G4 for only $79 off of ebay. It ran classic and I would have to wait to get OS 10.4 which came out earlier that year but I was on my way and I was pleasently surprised by how well it worked but then again last time I used Classic substantially I was using a Mac with 48 Mb of RAM so there was a great speed boost from using 384 Mb and having a 350 MHz G4 but I was finally using the computer not just trying to make it work and by the time I got Tiger on it and an extra 64 Mb of RAM it was just a pleasure to work with and to this day that installation of Tiger has been upgraded to Leopard on a G5 without ever needing a reinstallation. That is the longest I have ever gone without having something go wrong with a computer and now I own a MacBook Pro too and I have never even considered going back to Windows. I have looked at it as I don't want to miss out like I missed out on Mac OS X in the beginning but I don't see anything remotely good coming out of Microsoft minus maybe a good mouse or video game controller any time soon. After all while you may need developers you can't rely only on them. (hint, hint Steve Ballmer)