[P1] 17" Laptops P.S.

[Fred Stevens K2FRD]

At 14:48 -0600 04/11/03, Remell Boyer wrote:
>I really didn't expect this kind of fevor over a little bit of 
>critism.  I was just stating that to me, your wintel stories sounded 
>a bit, exaggerated.

They're not, at least in my own experience with my PCs. Almost every 
time I want to do what would be a simple upgrade or installation on 
my Mac (a few seconds or minutes) takes hours, sometimes days and 
weeks on my PCs. I have gotten so shellshocked at the prospect of 
installing something new on my PC that I dread such an installation, 
wondering what will go wrong this time, how long will it take before 
I finally get it working, and how much is it going to cost me in 
unexpected supplementary purchases before I finally get it working?

>  I also realize that the mac is the platform of your choice and I 
>appreciate your zeal.  It seems that many of you have left that 
>platform never to return, and have no recent experience in it.  I 
>do, I follow both platforms because I find them both very 
>interesting.  Being on both sides of the fence, I can see each 
>platform for what it is, and give no preferencial treatment to 
>either.

I also see it from both sides of the fence and I often remark (often 
publicly) that Microsoft didn't get where it is today on its 
technical merits.

>
>Numbers are numbers, my friends.  and 3500 bucks is still 3500 (or 
>however much you have to pay to get an equivalent machine, but 
>pointing out that up macs have just barely cracked high end pc 
>specs) bucks.  If you compare features, then you will see that the 
>mac platform over the years has realized that the way it was doing 
>it was wrong, and has continually moved over to pc style hardware. 
>And still no multi-button mouse?

My Macally optical mouse works fine with its left-click, right-click, 
scroll wheel on my iBook 14.1" 900. $30. Worked fine out of the box 
as a plug-and-play; the included software CD wasn't necessary except 
to provide the mouse with its own preferences (click and scroll 
speeds). I could have, but didn't get and don't need anything any 
fancier (trackball, up-down scroll, inside-out and 
trim-the-sideburns). My Dell's optical with all the trimmings keeps 
losing its cursor.

>But thats not the point.  The point of my post was to show a little 
>bit of contrast, to just show a counterpoint to the way you were 
>discussing the windows machines.  They are different no doubt, but I 
>don't believe that your experiences are true of every user.  The 
>scales are just not that unbalanced.

Not in my experience.

>   What I have read a horror stories, and thats all they are. 
>Everything usually falls in the middle.  Happy Mac users, Happy PC 
>users =).

As a [rabid] Mac fan who uses both platforms and is the only Mac 
users among a group of 40 or so technically-oriented computer users 
(ham radio operators), I was continuously on the defensive. In recent 
years, I have prevailed and am now on the offensive with most Windows 
and PC users admitting their PC is inferior to my Mac. This is 
especially borne out when the latest virus bites someone and they end 
up having to send their machine to the shop for major [expensive] 
repairs/disinfecting. I don't know more than a few who are perfectly 
happy with their PCs, but these few do only occasional email and 
browsing, nothing else.

One, however, is VERY happy with PCs. He's a PC/Windows 
software/hardware technician and is VERY well paid for his services 
at a major national firm. He makes a LOT of additional bucks by 
fixing and servicing PCs on the cuff. He recently made the statement 
that "everytime Microsoft comes out with something new, it means more 
money for me to fix everyone's computers."

However, the SINGLEMOST REASON why the PC users don't switch to Macs 
is that they have grown accustomed to their PCs, warts and all, and 
"are too old to change and don't want to learn a new system".

-- 
73 de Fred Stevens K2FRD
http://home.stny.rr.com/k2frd/K2FRD.htm