So, until recently, I’ve been doing all of my writing, Internet-ting, photo-saving, etc., on a rather elderly Toshiba laptop.
Here is a picture of said elderly laptop.
I’ve had a string of PC-related problems in recent years, most commonly involving melted motherboards which required entire computers to be replaced. We’d bought the extended it-broke-but-it-wasn’t-my-fault-I-swear warranties, which was great because I didn’t have to buy a new computer. It was terrible because I just kept replacing broken PCs with new PCs which eventually . . . broke.
Finally I got the Toshiba, which happily puttered along past the end date of the latest warranty. Hooray! Of course, as it entered the twilight of it’s working years, things began to go wrong. The power cord got upset about being crunched up against the wall all the time and it had to be replaced.
The battery, on a full charge, lasted a maximum of 20 minutes.
It began to load, run, wake up, and/or reboot sloooooowly. There was a lot of knuckle-cracking and throat-clearing it had to get through before it was ready to do any actual work. It started to freeze up so badly that I’d just have to turn it off midtask and hope to God I’d saved my work recently.
The Blue Screen of Death (you know. . . “Beginning physical memory dump. Physical memory dump complete?” That one.) became a common sight.
In order to protect its increasingly frail workings, I bought and installed McAfee’s virus/firewall/suit-of-PC-armor software.
Oh my God.
It took over the entire life of the computer, bursting in on me at inopportune moments like some sort of deranged technological side-kick with a lazy eye and high-water pants, waving its arms and shouting about the viral armageddon which would surely befall me at any moment if I didn’t update my spam filter now, NOW! (Wow. That was a really long sentence.) Agreeing to the updates just sent Mad McAfee off into a corner to sulk over a cup of tea while it calculated the remaining upload times on some sort of antiquated abacus.
Why yes, I *did* hate that software program. What makes you ask?
ANYway. It was clearly time for a new computer. And I made the decision to go Mac.
I was a little hesitant about it. After all, I was used to Microsoft. I’ve always had PCs. They’re cheaper. I knew how to use them (at least, sufficiently for my non-tech-geek purposes.) And truth be told, I was a little concerned that I’m not actually cool enough to be a Mac person. But most of the writers I know have and love Macs, and I figured if some sort of secret send-her-over-to-HP alarm went off when I entered the Apple store, I would pull out my novelist trump card and see if they would ignore the diaper-bag and practical shoes long enough to sell me a laptop.
It worked! I fooled them into letting me have one to take home! Yay!
Here’s the new Mac.
I’m still getting used to it. The iWork stuff is different than Office (duh,) and I’m finding myself clicking on the little “Help” section a lot with pretty inane questions. But I love the multi-touch-mouse-pad-thingie. And I can use Scrivener now, which I’m also getting used to, but if you write books, it’s an *awesome* software program and you can try it for 30 days, free. Whether it’s really as trouble free as all the Mac-lovers out there have promised me, only time will tell. For now, though, I’m just happy to have a computer that I don’t have to conduct elaborate prayer rituals over every time I want to hit the power button.
So. I guess I’m a Mac. Just don’t tell my sensible grey wool coat, okay?