Switching to the Dark Side

I've finally succumbed and turned to the dark side.  I've given up on Windows and bought a Mac  Book.  I'd told myself I'd never buy another Apple after they dumped the Apple II line.  My first computer was a beauty - an A motherboard Apple IIe with 64 K of ram (that's kilobytes my friend) and dual 128 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.  It came with a state of the art 10" green and black screen.  That puppy put me back $2500 (that's in 1979 dollars) and I must say it was love at first sight.  I eventually added another 64 K of ram: cost $120, a 10 megabyte hard drive that sounded like a vacuum cleaner and was the size of a small suitcase: cost $500 and a Brother clackity-clack dot matrix printer: cost $300.  The Apple IIe eventually ended up running a creative writing BBS called The Blue Parrot.  The Parrot was up and running for 5 years, an eternity for BBSs in pre-Internet days, then my power supply croaked. Sigh.

Saying no way to Apple products, I drifted from the Atari ST (great machine, no user base) into the IBM world.  Microsoft DOS sucked, Windows was even worse, but like most clones, I made do the best I could.

A few months ago, my Dell Inspiration showed ominous signs of pending failure:  boot errors, frequent blue screens of death - common enough with Windows, but the frequency was increasing.  I looked around - XP was on the way out the door and Vista sounded like hell on earth.  I looked at the new Macbook-a little light on ram , but the reviews were good and the operating system seemed solid.  I said what the hell and plunked down $1300 and took that puppy home.

I haven't been disappointed.

Next:  A review of the computer and software from a long time computer nerd perspective.