In the control systems world computers are a must have requirement. So naturally I had to become fluent with windows. Have used computers briefly before going to school for electronics systems engineering technology the only OS I was aware of was windows and DOS.

Once I started getting into computer through school it became apparent that there were quite a few “anomalies” that seem to constantly occur within the windows environment. At first they seemed like quirks, I actually enjoyed jumping into command prompt and fixing them (it seemed to impress people, although its not very hard). Then my friends began to clue in that I knew a thing or two about computers and weekends were less about hanging out and more about Ryan coming over to repair something while we drank beer. Which I enjoyed at first as well.

Then what used to be only on the weekends became calls in the middle of the week while I was studying or doing projects. Thats when I realized that these are not just anomalies of the OS that the user initiates, they are major bugs that require your constant attention to fix.

Around this point Microsoft was developing Vista, which was code named “Longhorn” and so I was excited. Yes I thought, now they will fix all of these issues and the OS will run far smoother than before. I jumped on the beta program and got my copy of longhorn. I backed up my laptop and started to install the new OS. This is where I should have noticed the downfall of this OS. After hours of waiting for the install to complete it seemed as though it would never finish, so I left it go overnight and in the morning there it sat, in the same spot that it was when I left it. I cancelled my install and did a system recovery to get XP back so I had a usable laptop. Turns out it didn’t have a device driver for my specific laptop at the time and it kept failing to set it up.

A new release of longhorn is out! I run home to download it. I got it installed this time, but I couldn’t connect to the internet because my NIC wouldn’t enable. I went on my desktop and searched the internet for possible solutions but to no avail. Oh well, restored my laptop back to XP and continues to wait for a new release.

Third times a charm, this one worked great, I installed longhorn and got online! Yes. This is when I began submitting issues into Microsoft. This OS was so buggy that it was un-usable (We can all attest to windows Vista being about the worst thing since ME). So once again I restored back to XP and continued to work.

About now I was tired of XP and I wanted to try something new. Enter linux and BSD. Wow, the options… you could have and do almost anything with linux. So many options. So a friend of mine used Suse. I figured, hey why not, if I have questions ill ask him, Haha. So I installed Suse on my laptop and wow did I like it. With a Gnome desktop it looked slick and it performed well too! Unfortunately at this time it was difficult to share things between linux and windows. All of my documents landed up in .odt format that my teachers couldn’t open, none of my microprocessor or automation software packages would run on the linux platform and I had to continually maintain the OS much like what I had to do with XP, Its just this was different as it was new and I still enjoyed it.

Fast forward a few years and I am working now. Vista was released and everybody hated it. I got a new job that required me to purchase a laptop. I still owned my original laptop and I had Ubuntu running pretty well on it. I also didn’t require any specific software to run on it either as I had a new desktop that I built out of school with XP running on it.

So looking into new laptops I found that anything with the latest processor hardware would only run Windows Vista. The drivers were not written for XP and so therefore I could’t use the laptop as only a hand full of software packages supported Vista. During my research I found out that Apples Mac OSX now ran on an Intel CPU and was capable of running windows. I started to investigate the hardware and wow, it was top notch. Easily comparable, usually more powerful, than the other laptops that I was sourcing. Guess what, this is what I found funny, the latest MacBook fully supported Windows XP as a native installation! Sold.

I brought my new MacBook home and immediately partitioned the hard drive to install windows XP. The Mac OSX system was nice and I liked using it, it reminded me of when I first started using Gnome. However I needed windows for work.

The laptop was fast, faster than anyone else’s at the office and I got some funny looks, Haha. Id show up with my MacBook and some of the comments were pretty funny. “Art Class is over”, “What video are you editing today?”, and “That tree outside needs a hug!”. But then i’d show them the performance and they would quiet down.

Then came VMWare for Mac OS. This was a new one for me. I had heard of virtualization before and only played with it a tiny bit. With VMWare Fusion I was able to mount my windows partition in my mac OS and run at nearly native speeds. Again, I was impressed! Now I get to use the flashy Mac OS and run windows as an application inside of it. Ok! So I played and played until I had it all setup, and realized that I could simply build a VM for every different purpose just to optimize the speed of windows. So I built up what I thought was the most optimal XP installation ad replicated it to build my four or so different installations of XP. Again, I was even more impressed. I could just click the play button and pick up right where I left each machine off and it would only take a few seconds. I could mount any hardware into the virtual environment for use with windows, I pulled out all of my overhead tasks such as email, spreadsheets, documents into my host OS and my windows installations were clean.

My time was now spent on work tasks as I hadn’t needed to “fix” anything on either the windows environment, or the Mac OS environment. This was weird. I actually didn’t mind not having to constantly fix things. During this time I was had also become a reseller of computer parts and systems and had been making a small markup on laptops and what not. Once I realized how much easier life is when your not constantly having to correct issues introduced by software I started to recommend my clients to purchase Apple products, Because they work.

Not because they are the best price, or the best for configuration, or the best for power. They simply just work and you dont have to think about it. Which is exactly what an operating system should do. It should fall into the background so the user can focus on tasks as opposed to being nagged by a prompty (I don’t think thats a word) OS that constantly needs your attention.

So when I am asked why I use Apple products……. I say because I don’t even know that they are there.