Dumping Windoze

OK, I am disappointed to read that the new MacBook Pro will not let me watch all my DVD's (I live in Angola, work all up and down the West African coast and am currently sitting next to Lake Albert in Uganda so you can imagine I have acquired quite a variety of regions) but......

I started with a Commodore 64 and went the windows 3 and onwards to XP route and am finally, utterly, totally and irretrievably p****d off with Windows. Yesterday was the last 'effing time a machine will tell me, 'oh, I'm so sorry, I have just suffered an irrecoverable error and I am going to have to shut the programme down, you know, the one with all that data you just pumped in, and, guess what, auto recover won't work because when I reboot, I won't start for a while and when I do, it won't be there and, later on, you'll find I have corrupted a few random files as well. Just to tease you a bit. You know you like it really'.

Well I don't. I'm not some sleazy politician who likes to spend his lunchtimes getting spanked in Soho.

Must be a virus. Norton says no. Spyware? Several costly versions of spyware cleaning and I am satisfied it can't be that. Then the final teaser, accept it, better lose a few hours downloading the latest windows and office security patches. After all, I did it a whole seven days ago so my system must be full of holes by now, only to get, 'windows authentication has determined that you may have been the victim of software piracy.....please give us yer credit card details and uncle Bill will try and make it better'.

Like **** I will.

When I saw my colleague's shiny new MacBook Pro, running MS Office software seamlessly and on our network, without hint of glitch or tremor and soooo fast (my laptop has 2.66Ghz and a gig of ram, it'll fry an egg quickly but try working on graphics files) I thought that's it.

Through the combined wonders of the internet and a charge card, one new MacBook Pro 17” plus all the necessary extras is on its way to me. I'll spend a hundred or so bucks on an external DVD drive to solve the multi region problem and stick it in the side pocket of the snazzy new MacBag to go with the iPod in it's snazzy iNcase, (incase of what I wonder?) and all the other goodies I just couldn’t resist in the MacShop on the MacSite.

Eye wateringly expensive but I'm tired of driving around in a clapped out Ford, I want a Bentley now. I've worked for it, I deserve it.

I understand the frustrations of my esteemed fellow posters who in spite of making a not inconsiderable expense, still cannot enjoy that single unit answer to their multi-media and workstation needs but, I assure you, in comparison to the years of torture, frustration and, not so very uncommonly, real grief when I lost something more than important, but dear to me (removable drive *:\ is not formatted, would you like windows to format it now? What? NO! FOR PITY'S SAKE NOOOoooo! IT'S MY BACK UP DRIVE!!!!!! Eject Eject oh please dear Lord let it Eject. And all the while that little drive light flickers and you know you're stuffed), the fact that the 'super’ drive isn't actually as super as we would like is the merest, trifling inconvenience. For me anyway, a long-suffering windows user.

What I can't understand is why Apple haven't told us?

By 'us' of course, I mean all the other ‘okes who are still struggling. Why don't Apple get on the telly and show some sweating sod desperately trying to get his PC laptop to boot up and then struggle to get it to behave while he gives his presentation and then lose the contract to some smooth chick with a MacBook running the same presentation software that he was using?

Just a thought 'cos Apple have sold a MacBook Pro to me by the purest chance that I would run into someone else who was using one. Next to Lake Albert. In Uganda.

Now statistically, that's fairly long odds on which to base a marketing strategy......