And thus begins the epic struggle, the quest for a new computer. Well, furtive looking around for a new computer now that I have some money with which to buy one. Bock and I wandered into London Drugs folllowing one our writing sessions (which was only partially successful and as usual surrounded by weird people) to look in their computer department. There was a Compaq Presario I was looking at on sale for about seven hundred bucks, but I need to do a little research and I want to look at two or three other places first.
And it has Vista on it, and you can't really get PCs without Vista on them, and Vista is problemmatic. Which makes me wonder if I should just give in and make the (possibly devonian) leap to Mac, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. If that would be a step up or not. On the one hand, I'm a child of the PC and I'm comfortable using them; on the other hand, I really want to call my children UNIVAC and that might be symptomatic of certain antiquarian tendencies. IE: change is not bad, per se.
Either way, I'm skipping Microsoft Office in favour of Open Office. Cheaper and more flexible. I'll load up all my writing onto my memory stick in preparation for the great migration, along with all the junk on my external hard drive. Like the music.
The other benefit of the Mac would be more flexibility and compatibility with iTunes and my iPod, although I haven't really encountered any problems thus far with the arrangement between my current PC and those things. At least, nothing that can't be attributed to the senility on my laptop's part.
Either way, I'm curious about more tech-savvy people's opinions on the matter; I really just need a machine that can handle music, internet browsing, torrents, word processing, image uploading & editing (not fullscale), videos...
Comments (6)
> There was a Compaq Presario
NO! DO NOT WANT!
> The other benefit of the Mac would be more
> flexibility and compatibility with iTunes
> and my iPod,
Well... that shouldn't really be an issue any more. Apple seems to have embraced the 90% of the world that use Windows.
The real benefits to getting a Mac are that it usually just works. The major exception being: Open Office doesn't really run on a Mac right now without some major nerd power. I barely have enough.
Posted by Michael | December 10, 2007 10:41 PM
Posted on December 10, 2007 22:41
PS. Why the hell isn't the comment popup window resizeable? I'll be fixing that soon, if you remind me.
Posted by Michael | December 10, 2007 10:42 PM
Posted on December 10, 2007 22:42
That's better.
Posted by Michael | December 10, 2007 10:52 PM
Posted on December 10, 2007 22:52
Umm... right... back at the plot...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125647-page,1/article.html
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2006/02/how-to-buy-a-laptop.html
http://www.computertrends.com/how-to-buy-laptops.asp
Posted by Michael | December 10, 2007 10:59 PM
Posted on December 10, 2007 22:59
There are plenty of word processor options on the Mac besides Open Office. Open Office does work for the Mac in the native interface but it's relatively new so it's a wee bit unstable.
But there are great alternatives in the meanwhile. AbiWord for example.
Posted by Jeremy | December 13, 2007 9:22 AM
Posted on December 13, 2007 09:22
I made the switch to mac over two years ago and feel pretty good about it.
Posted by caroline | December 17, 2007 5:12 PM
Posted on December 17, 2007 17:12