Jeesh, has it been this long?

I'm now actually comparing the two systems to see which one to buy. Leopard is coming out soon, and so far I've been unimpressed by Vista. Sure, it's pretty, but my wife's laptop that has it pre-installed has been my intro to it - so far there's nothing that makes want to get it. XP is just fine with me. So why not just upgrade my current hardware?

I have two kids and I've found that my patience with computers is going downhill. I no longer have time to rip the thing apart if there's a problem. Also, I'm accumulating stacks of MiniDV tapes of my kids that I want to burn to DVD after some limited editing. I have Premiere on the PC, and frankly working with Video is a nightmare. My wife wouldn't be able to do it. I've used the Mac, and I like the (agreeably limited) iLife suite.

In the next several days I'll be posting pros/cons of each.

Mac - pretty, expensive, intuitive, secure.
PC - cheap, somewhat pretty, frustrating, and unsecure.

It Begins.

First of all, I can't believe the sum of all the incredible technology created over the last 100 years has resulted in this: the inane ramblings of myself, broadcast for all to see throughout the world....but I digress.

So here I am, staring at the second-hand 19" CRT monitor I bought from some guy at work for $20 and the 15" Samsung LCD I got from the "freeflatscreen" deal, both hooked up to my custom PC I built from the ground up - motherboard, hard drives, video card, etc. - all my choice. It's a fantastic PC, running the latest Windows XP Professional SP2 OS. It's fast. It's cheap. It has tons of software. And it pisses me off to no end.

Indeed, I re-installed Windows XP for the tenth time last weekend. Each time it takes me about 1 hour for the initial install, and about ten more to get all the software resintalled. This time I was having a problem with SP2 recognizing and enabling the USB2 ports. Why? Who knows.

It's not like I don't know what I'm doing. I built my first PC using thrown-out parts in 1989. It was an original IBM PC-XT (4.77mhz, folks) with a 10meg hard drive, and a 5 1/4" floppy. The memory was maxed out at 640K, which you installed by physically plugging the chips into the motherboard. The case was a beast of a thing - IBM wasn't screwing around. It's as if they had some military spec'd design for the thing. Perhaps the best part was the power supply - it had this tremendous on/off switch that made a great "k-lunk" when you'd muster enough brute force to turn the thing on.

Since then, I've seen OS's come and go. DOS 3.3. DOS 5 (terrible). Windows 386. Windows 3.0. Windows 3.1. NeXT (yes, I used one in college). GEM (I had an Atari 1040ST). While in college at UW-Madison, we were given Macs to use in computer labs. I hated them. I was happier sitting in front of a dumb DEC terminal than have to stare back at that smirking smiley face. PASCAL was no fun on it, either. It was small. It was monochrome. An the keyboard was "clunky." Plus, the geeks (consider the source) that ran the computer labs had them all geeked out, right down to the Borg Ship splash screen while it booted.

I have a feeling that stupid smiley face will be staring at me again...this time at home. I will continue to purge my innermost hatred for this computer I'm using, all in the hope of alleviating my pain.

I don't want to hear from the Linux folks. My answer to you: yes, I know. It's a fine operating system. I installed Slackware back in 1997, and I currently have an entire drive dedicated to it. My wife hates it, and any operating system that I have to recompile frankly doesn't interested me.