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Back to Wintel
Apple has lost a customer. Before you hit the "back" button or send flame mail, let me explain. I've been a Mac enthusiast since 1984. I've also had the occasion to use PCs, running DOS, Windows, OS/2, and a stab at Linux. Around the time the first Power Macs came out, I found myself in the market for a new computer. I'd given my old Mac Plus to my niece to use at college, and my 386 box was just not making it. I debated over buying an Intel-based machine or one of the new Macs. I opted for the Mac. Great little machine! Over the course of the next two years, the Mac served me well. However, as the processor demands of newer and newer software increased, I found myself struggling to maintain a responsive machine. I plunked 40 meg of RAM into it, replaced the drive with a bigger one when the original finally decided to go south, and generally tried to keep the system tuned and maintained. It soon became apparent that it was becoming a dog. OK, you're saying, so go buy a new computer. Right. In the meantime, Apple basically killed clone licensing, ensuring that if I wanted to stay in the Mac camp, I'd have to really fork out big bucks. To add insult to injury, the old Apple Nubus design (long since replaced by PCI bus design) was not being supported. It would be virtually impossible to really upgrade the system hardware. The video sucked. About two weeks ago, I went window-shopping (no pun intended). I found I could buy a hot new Mac for around $3,000 (no monitor), or I could buy a P-166 MMX Pentium box with Windows 95 and some decent software for about $700 (no monitor). I'd already upgraded to a nice 17-inch flat screen monitor for the Mac, and it would work just as well with a PC. As you might guess by now, I came home with the P166, not the Mac. You know what? It screams. It has last year's chip, but so what? The drive is fast. Frontier, the web-authoring program I use (recently ported to Windows from the Mac platform) flies on the new machine. Netscape flies. Explorer flies. Word97 opens in about 1 second. I like it! I'm not thrilled with some of the things that I perceive Microsoft doing. Woe unto you if you do decide to deinstall the Explorer web browser. If you try to "web preview" an HTML page in Word97, it won't work with Netscape. Little stuff like that ticks me off. For now, I'll live with that. I drank the Kool-Aid, and it didn't taste as bad as I expected. However, I have a 1-gig drive partition set aside for Linux, just in case... |
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