“I had a chance to ponder my revenge just the other day as I watched the remains of my laptop being wheeled out of the house and over to The Computer Guy (whose telephone number is now on our home phone’s ‘speed dial’), taking another hopeless journey to try and raise my hard drive from the dead, an entire year of my writing sucked into the void,” Cindy McManus writes for The Hingham Journal. “I had just spent most of my Saturday dutifully ridding the household PC’s of spyware, adware, Trojans, pop-ups, key loggers, etc., etc., etc.”
I spent all day Sunday carefully choosing updates to the operating system, holding my breath each time I gingerly hit the “restart” button, praying that the cure I was about to introduce wasn’t worse than the disease.
It almost worked. The final update beckoned me to “restart to complete the installation.” I did. It didn’t. Instead of the cheerful chimes of a happy operating system booting up for another day’s work, I got insteada little message box telling me a key component of my operating system was no more. Ditto for all the stuff on my laptop.
I’d cry, but this has happened so many times on so many different computers that I am no longer surprised. I have resigned myself to my fate, my karma the same as that of everybody else with a PC: We will lose everything, no matter what we do, no matter how careful we are, no matter what plans we make. It’s just the way things are.
By this time you the reader are probably wondering why, after all the aggravation, all the viruses, all the lost words, I haven’t just gone out and replaced my PC with a reliable Apple computer.
I don’t have much of a defense other than a weak “But Everyone Else Has Windows”-which in reality is a lot more significant of an excuse than it sounds because it is likely the number one reason that millions of other fed up PC users haven’t dialed up Steve Jobs and begged for a Power Book of their very own.
The fact of the matter is that everything runs on Windows. My employer requires my work to be produced using Windows. The cash registers at the local Stop and Shop useWindows to tally up my grocery order. My bank runs through a server that pays my bills and accepts my deposits using Windows.
We can’t change because everyone else uses it. If everyone else has it, we have to have it because if we don’t, doing work or conducting business becomes almost impossible. If everyone uses it, other software companies see no value in writing software for anything else because there is no money to be made from doing so. And if there is no software alternative we will continue to use good ol’ buggy, bloated, error-filled Microsoft products (and here is where we come full circle) because everyone else does.
But this latest incident, the latest in a never-ending string of insults (just ask The Computer Guy) has done me in. There comes a time when you have to look into the mirror and ask yourself just why you seem to so enjoy the endless abuse. Today that day came for me.
As I said, my job requires a PC but (with apologies to my employer) when it comes to any stuff that matters I won’t be using it.And although The Computer Guy has worked his usual magic (he has promised to rescue the draft of my not-so-great American Novel along with most of the other documents on my dead hard drive) I’ll likely soon be using my Windows laptop as a doorstop.
Bye-Bye Bill.
Cindy McManus (whose next laptop will most assuredly be a Mac) is a freelance writer. She lives in Hingham. If she ever gets her PC running again you can reach her via email at cindymcmanus@gmail.com
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’d probably be able to actually hear to sound of millions of eyes popping open simultaneously if we weren’t always listening to our iPods. And “everything” doesn’t run on Windows; things like iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, Pages, iChat, GarageBand, Final Cut, iDVD, Safari, Mail, iCal, etc., etc., etc.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Orlando Sentinel writer dumps Windows for Mac and writes ‘God bless Apple’ – January 16, 2005
Mac users should not buy Microsoft software – May 16, 2003
