I've switched

[phenom]

Okay, so I've used, built, broken, fixed, owned PCs for about... uhh... 13 years or so.

'bout a month or so ago, my wife, in a roundabout way, was in need of a new computer. That is to say her office needed a new computer, of the PC variety, so the opportunity presented itself to migrate her PC to the office, and to replace her PC at home.

She wanted an iMac.

I didn't want her to have an iMac.

But who am I?

So we went to CompUSA and scoped out the 17" iMac. The decision was made, but alas, they had none in stock.

The 20? They had exactly one.

"Bring me the 20" iMac, and throw an iPod mini in for kicks," my wife said.

Got it home, hooked it up, but... uhh... no keyboard. See, it was an open box, and the tech who checked it out swiped the keyboard. One more trip out and we were all set up.

To say it was a little overwhelming would be an understatement. Remember, we're PC users.

To make a long story uhh... not much longer...

two weeks later I was at the Apple store buying a 15" Powerbook for myself. Last night I picked up an iPod.

We might be hooked.

 

[adam80]

Yeah, your hooked. Started with an ipod myself 20GB -> 30GB iPod - > PowerMac G4 - > then I bought a powerbook and use it as my sole machine. (have since sold the powermac and ipods) Now if I can only get my wife to switch...

 

[dziner]

Welcome to the family Phenom!

 

[witeshark]

Welcome to the Mac world! There are so many Mac web sites, see the list in the web sites forum near the bottom of the forums list from the Home menu...

 

[Padawan]

Welcome! I'm sure as time goes on, you'll be thanking your wife more and more.

 

[KLank]

Yeah, sounds like your hooked.

I switched a week ago tomorrow and so far I love my PowerBook. The wife already wants an iBook, but seeing as money don't grow on trees, she's going to have to wait.

 

[TylerMoney]

I'm definently hooked as well...started with using the macs at my school, then getting a powerbook, then getting an iPod...now all I want to do is learn and play with macs....and my iPod....the problem now is..no more money....darn...I imagine my next big mac purchase will be in 2-3 years..hopefully then I'll buy the latest powerbook, and powermac..and iPod...

I am planning on buying iLife 4 though....gaurage band just looks so cool.

 

[GLJones]

I always thought Macs had cool hardware but never really cared for the OS. I used PCs at work and had 6-7 of them in my house, all networked.t work

As any PC owner knows, many hours were spent fixing windows errors, virus protection updates, getting rid of spyware, etc....

My current role at work involves lots of Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator and such work. I had just received a new state-of-the-art PC when we got word that a forggotten order we put in the capital budget last year (for this year) had come in. It was a new G5 with flat panel display. We had purchased 2 a few months earlier for our "Mac" room where a couple of graphic artists work. This "Forgotten" Mac was intended for them but they already had them. I ended up with it.

I loaded Flash MX 2004, Abobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office X. Having little experience with OS X I jumped right in. It wasn't long before I moved to the Mac entirely. My 2.8 ghz PC is now my Outlook machine. Unfortunately, the way our companies mail system is set up, the only way to access it with the Mac is with the OS 9 version of Outlook. Entorage and the many plugins and converters just don't work. (Our exchange servers web extesions are turned off and I don't think the IT department for a 60,000 employee company on PCs is going to change anything for us few Mac users.)

It's now 3 months later and my home is down to one PC, an IBM laptop that became part of the stereo running the windows version of iTunes, a Dell laptop that I cleaned off and will give to my mother-in-law this summer when she visits, and my new 17" Powerbook and my wife's new 12" iBook.

In the past couple of months, I have had very few problems. I wish I could say none but I got a stick of bad 512mb memory from a non-Apple source for my Powerbook and started having random kernel panics, including one last week that occured during the upgrade to OS 10.3.3. That crash required a complete OS reinstall from CD. My settings and prefs were saved and in about 2 hours, everything was restored and I was on 10.3.3. On a PC, this would have been a 10-12 hour affair reinstalling all the software and resetting prefs.

I have since removed the bad memory and have had ZERO problems and my computer had not even been rebotted for a week until yesterday when I updated iChat.

I can only imagine how many I.T. labor hours and employee lost hours would disappear if the company was on Macs. None of the macs in our office ever have problems. We have an old G3 that someone put OS X on that tends to die from time to time but the department using it has never removed anything and the hard drive is full and no one does any updates or such. It's been around for years that way. I am sure it would purr if someone cleared the old crap off the drive and cleaned up the system a bit.

I am now recommending Macs to all my friends. At work, people are facinated when I attend meetings with my 17" powerbook. They are really impressed when I show then the uptime showing 6 days, 21:03 hours. They are used to rebooting their PCs a couple times a day.

Another great feature of the Macs on our company network......they go completely around the log-in screens accessing the Internet through the company firewall. We use a different proxy that is outside the tracking and challenge system. Allows us to transfer files that the firewall doesn't normally allow. Since we are on Macs, we don't have to worry about the viruses PC users would get if they downloaded the wrong thing.

Boy that's a long post.....Back to your regularly scheduled postings....

Jerry

 

[Murlyn]

awesome! Great to hear!

 

[witeshark]

That is sweet to hear! I switched over Christmas and have not had to reboot yet --except after software updates. I used to reboot my pc regularly, and in the last months I had a bad feeling things were getting nasty so I started a habbit of not really using it -just a quick e-mail retrieve and off line off the virus radar -now I'm happily online all I want to be I was talking to a friend whose bro is staying in doz, and he has disabled attachments to keep his box safe... I told my friend -hey, I can see all the attachments a I want, even open them if I like... it made him stop and think... He wants a Mac

 

[msSwitch]

Okay, so I've used, built, broken, fixed, owned PCs for about... uhh... 13 years or so.

'bout a month or so ago, my wife, in a roundabout way, was in need of a new computer. That is to say her office needed a new computer, of the PC variety, so the opportunity presented itself to migrate her PC to the office, and to replace her PC at home.

She wanted an iMac.

I didn't want her to have an iMac.

But who am I?

So we went to CompUSA and scoped out the 17" iMac. The decision was made, but alas, they had none in stock.

The 20? They had exactly one.

"Bring me the 20" iMac, and throw an iPod mini in for kicks," my wife said.

Got it home, hooked it up, but... uhh... no keyboard. See, it was an open box, and the tech who checked it out swiped the keyboard. One more trip out and we were all set up.

To say it was a little overwhelming would be an understatement. Remember, we're PC users.

To make a long story uhh... not much longer...

two weeks later I was at the Apple store buying a 15" Powerbook for myself. Last night I picked up an iPod.

We might be hooked.

^5 for wifey! My husband believes that anything with a keyboard and a color screen is the latest and greatest in technology. He still can't understand why I've deserted my PCs for a Powerbook. He's betting me a new iPod that my PB will end up in my "electronics graveyard" with all my other end of life gadgets. I never knew getting another iPod would be this free and easy... I should have bet a Cinema Display

 

[Murlyn]

Yeah no kidding! Im beginning to wish that I was a wifey and not a hubby

 

[WilliS]

switcher posts give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside

welcome to the other side, where the grass IS always greener

 

[witeshark]

switcher posts give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside

welcome to the other side, where the grass IS always greener

Totally! Same here!

 

[KLank]

I am now recommending Macs to all my friends. At work, people are facinated when I attend meetings with my 17" powerbook. They are really impressed when I show then the uptime showing 6 days, 21:03 hours. They are used to rebooting their PCs a couple times a day.

So you don't shutdown the laptop? Do you just close it and let it sleep? I generally will shutdown the laptop when I'm done with it for the day. Do you guys leave your laptops on and just put them to sleep?

 

[trenollet]

I usually just close the lid and put it in the case until I need it again. It's kinda nice to know that if you don't use it for a few days, it'll still have enough battery to start right up a go for an hour I guess sleep mode doesn't need much juice at all. Hummmm, I wonder how long an iBook will go before the battery gives out in sleep mode. TEST TIME!!! I'll put my 14" iBook to sleep tonight and let you know when the light stops blinking.

Later,

 

[StarManta]

My Powerbook uses about 10% of the battery in a day in sleep mode. (I only know this from way back when I actually occasionally went a day without using my powerbook... Long time since I've had one of those days....

 

[GLJones]

I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. When I need it, open the lid and in 2 seconds, I am up and working. Why wait 30-45 seconds for a computer to boot up when it can awake in a second or two and will run for months between reboots with no slowdown or problems. That's the beauty of the UNIX (BSD) operating system. Stability is everything.

Jerry
Currently running with 3 days uptime after reboot that was required after installing iChat's last update.

 

[trenollet]

I usually just close the lid and put it in the case until I need it again. It's kinda nice to know that if you don't use it for a few days, it'll still have enough battery to start right up a go for an hour I guess sleep mode doesn't need much juice at all. Hummmm, I wonder how long an iBook will go before the battery gives out in sleep mode. TEST TIME!!! I'll put my 14" iBook to sleep tonight and let you know when the light stops blinking.

Later,

yeah, well, couldn't go more than 24 hours without using it, however it's been 24 hours since I put it to sleep and it used 8% of the battery. So based on that, the iBook 933 should stay in sleep mode for 12.5 days. I don't have a powerbook but StarManta says his uses about 10% per day, easy math here = 10 days.

 

[phenom]

I close the lid.

Then I close it again.

Then again.

Then again.

Then again.

Then again; and it latches.