- My main desktop is old. Its not exactly dying, but it won't be long before it does. It also at an age now where the only salvageable parts would be the case and the optical drives. I long for the performance increase of a dual core chip, so that effectively means a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, hard drive, PSU.
- A Mac Mini is relatively cheap. I get the new computer I need for not much more than I would pay to get a new system to self build. I have been building computers for many years now and quite enjoy it. However, the Mac Mini has all the specs I would want, but also in a small form factor (which is quite important to me now) and comes with OSX.
- I've had an XP install for a few years now specifically for gaming (Half Life 2 for me, Sims 2 for Jessica). Just over a year ago now though we were lucky enough to get a Wii just before Christmas and a few months back I bought an XBox 360 mainly for playing Pro Evolution Soccer against my friend (see, I am not anti-Microsoft). I don't use a PC for gaming any more, and don't really want to partake in that upgrade race any more thanks. XP as an operating system was an improvement on 98 (which was what drove me to Linux), but it has very little to offer me; it looks ugly, its very difficult to customise to your liking and has very few useful applications. It runs ok for the short time I use it but its never felt "comfortable"
- I got a "free" iPod just before Christmas. Not all the "free" iPod sites are a scam, and I had to press gang some friends and family into spending a fiver for me, but I got there in the end. As I've done countless hours of free support for them they didn't mind. This was my first foray into the Apple world and I was really pleased. I quickly gave up on trying to get my Ipod Classic 80Gb supported fully in Linux; Ubuntu did quite a good job of getting the music on there, but the Artwork failed miserably and with cover flow such a feature in the classic I let XP manage it with iTunes. I know a lot of people hate iTunes but personally I get along with it fine. The longer I had my iPod, the more I wanted a Mac.
- Vista is just awful. My sister was kind enough to buy me a laptop recently. Its not too powerful, but Ubuntu runs great on it. Vista, on the other hand, runs like a dog. Its a Gateway, and hats off to them, they include a full Vista CD with the laptop. The first thing I did was to reinstall a clean version of Vista, which did run better without the "extras" Gateway has installed, but Ubuntu really showed it up. Admittedly, Vista has some usefull applications as part of the operating system, but still not anything I particularly enjoyed using.
So there it was, all roads seemed to point to Apple. I will mention in another post why Linux no longer cuts its for me on the desktop.
