Switcher's remorse?

I've had my MacBook almost 2 months now and I love it, but lately I seem bored with it. Ok maybe bored isn't the word... I feel like I get things done quickly and then find myself with nothing to do.

On my pc, I would use the time between projects to defrag, tweak, optimize, customize scan for viruses and spyware and re-arrange my files so I could find them later. Since I got the MacBook I don't do any of that anymore...

Is this just a phase? Or part of the switching process? Maybe I should just go off and take pictures and hope it passes...

Now you have moe time for life

Get used to it, lol. I find myself getting done with what I need to get done in very short order (check my email & forecast in the morning) by virtue of the fact that I just look at the dock to see if I have any new mail, then use the weather dashboard widget to see the weather. It's awesome in the morning... that same stuff would take 5-10 minutes before I got a Mac, now it's literally 30 seconds. That's precious sleep time, lol... especially since I get up at 4:30AM to drive in to work.

I have noticed that somewhat,
how do i cure it?
Buy more macs.
Take my advice,
dont to it.
We have my PowerMac G4 DA,
a PowerMac 5400,
a QuickSilver,
2 iMac G3's,
One, two, three, FOUR PowerBook G3s (2 more broken wallstreets).

How many get used daily?
Well my DA,
one iMac,
The QuickSilver.

The rest get used occasionally.
Everyone in my immediate family has a mac except my mother.
And her PC bugging her.
Shes the type of person who gets annoyed when the computer doesnt work at everything and anything-recently, her Bjeweled game wouldnt run.
OH MAN THAT DAY SUCKED.

Im thinking about switching her,
but the couple of games she does play i dont think run on mac.
ACtually i was going to make a thread on that right now and i saw this one.

Anyway,
I agree with rman,
i have more time do to things i SHOULD be doing instead of being on the computer.

Wow, I actually have been feeling exactly that! It's weird isn't it? It's almost like PC's were more fun, I guess when I'm one of those people who likes to fix things especially computers and since my mac never breaks well I guess I get bored, I'm never going back to windows, but maybe I'll get a job as an IT Admin or something, than i get to fix stuff and don't have to deal with that in my free time.

But on a more serious note and more on topic note , I really do have more free time with my Mac I get everything done much more quickly and efficiently and this leaves me with more free time to practice my guitar, sleep, and just relax, it's pretty awesome I suppose.

Oh glad someone said it lol I thought I was just TOO spoiled hehe

Before I got this, I was on PC was really wanting to get more into graphics and webpage design.. I found myself fighting with my programs more and more so didn't have the time to devote to it... Now I'm going to be able to take the time to get into these things! Maybe mac programming too hehe (as soon as I give up on my old PC bad habit lol)

I was kind of thinking the same thing as well but more along the lines of, am I going to lose my problem solving skills? With a PC there were problems and you would try all these different things to get it to work or work around it. The only problem I have had on my MBP is one time iTunes would freeze up on start up. It was because I didn't have my external HD plugged in!

That is one reason I keep a few PC's around. When I get the urge to mess around with computer hardware I have an outlet! That is when I am not fixing systems for friends and clients.

The Vindicat3d said:

but maybe I'll get a job as an IT Admin or something, than i get to fix stuff and don't have to deal with that in my free time.

Click to expand...

that's what i do. it's nice to know that 99% of the time i'm dealing with windows related issues, i'm getting paid for it.

I find my mac a lot more fun than my previous Desktop PC....
I find that there are a lot more things that I can do with it...
there are a ton of cool apps that you can play around with. and you don't have to waste time to install something just to try it, normally, I just run an app I have downloaded right in the disk image just to see if it is what I wanted

Fiasco said:

I've had my MacBook almost 2 months now and I love it, but lately I seem bored with it. Ok maybe bored isn't the word... I feel like I get things done quickly and then find myself with nothing to do.

On my pc, I would use the time between projects to defrag, tweak, optimize, customize scan for viruses and spyware and re-arrange my files so I could find them later. Since I got the MacBook I don't do any of that anymore...

Is this just a phase? Or part of the switching process? Maybe I should just go off and take pictures and hope it passes...

Click to expand...

Take pictures, mess around with them, make some videos, surf youtube and save the ones you like? Create a website with iWeb, play around with Garageband, sort your music.... Surf apple and check out the downloads/widgets....

I get bored sometimes too but only because I hadn't gone out and taken pictures that day.... LOL...

You'll find your nitch and you won't be bored anymore...

I can't get my breath!!!

Have you people considered some kind of professional help, such as therapy?

shfle said:

I can't get my breath!!!

Have you people considered some kind of professional help, such as therapy?

Click to expand...

No, have you?

MACyMouse said:

Take pictures, mess around with them, make some videos, surf youtube and save the ones you like? Create a website with iWeb, play around with Garageband, sort your music.... Surf apple and check out the downloads/widgets....

I get bored sometimes too but only because I hadn't gone out and taken pictures that day.... LOL...

You'll find your nitch and you won't be bored anymore...

Click to expand...

You may be right... I think I'll use the free time to figure out my new DSLR camera and improve my photography.

Fiasco said:

You may be right... I think I'll use the free time to figure out my new DSLR camera and improve my photography.

Click to expand...

Go for it photography really is a great thing... I just picked it up last year and have been really into it since.

You need a hobby. Take up photography or music (Logic Express?), or catch up on some classic TV series, or take up running, martial arts etc. Watching a defrag has to be worse that watching paint dry, no?

Zoolook said:

You need a hobby. Take up photography or music (Logic Express?), or catch up on some classic TV series, or take up running, martial arts etc. Watching a defrag has to be worse that watching paint dry, no?

Click to expand...

No... I actually enjoy watching and studying status bars, weird eh?!

The Vindicat3d said:

No... I actually enjoy watching and studying status bars, weird eh?!

Click to expand...

LOL - that's pretty weird.

I used to love keeping my PC tip-top, in fact my VM in Parallels now gets a lot of care and attention, even though I only run MS Money within it. It's a hard habit to shake! I feel your pain bro!

A hobby

Here's a suggestion that would help ease the no-fiddle blues. Just for kicks, get a cheap G3 with at least 256 megs of RAM and running OS 9.2.2 (making sure it has the proper install/repair disks). Partition the drive into two, then find a copy of Norton Utilities for OS 9. Load Norton into at least one partition to keep the other one in top condition (or load Norton in each to keep each runnning properly). Then you could run disk repairs and defrags to your heart's content. Play with the extensions folder and control-panels folder. If you screw it up, just copy over the system folder from the other partition, and all will be well again.

Load one partition with Mozilla 1.3.1 and a couple of Firefox extensions.

All of this will take days or weeks, but you'll learn a lot about the whys and wherefores of OS X because a lot of it functions like OS 9. But with 9, it's more transparent and easier to figure out. 9 and X have many parallels, though it's the far-different coding that makes it so.

The best part, though, would be to connect the G3 to your OS X machine on a network or through Target mode. This would make the OS X system file child's play to fiddle with. OS 9 is a great OS X fixer-upper. Nothing is off-limits. It bypasses nearly every fail-safe there is. Only one f'rinstance: There's no clogged X trash that 9 can't empty.

Learning 9 as a hobby will give you back what you lost — the constant computer hand-holding — though there's a lot less of it with 9 than with Windows — and widen the possibilities with what you would learn about X.

If you like problem solving, then why not take up programming? Its different than fixing things but it certainly helps logical problem solving and different ways of coding solutions.
You have a choice of plain GCC, XCode, PHP, or Real Basic depending on your skills and you can write programs to do stuff you normally have to look or pay for...