That tears it! I’m switching!

I’ve become a statistics.  I’m joining the league of people who are deciding to ditch the Microsoft Platform and going to the Mac.  While I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but the last couple of months have done me in with Vista.  

I was one of the ones that was excited about Vista.  I waited a few months until I got it, and at first it seemed ok.  Actually, I was pretty impress about some of the features (notably the interaction with different projectors, and the auto-switching to presentation mode).  But then things started to annoy me.

• I couldn’t figure out why my laptop’s hard drive was churning at 100% for the first 15 minutes of each boot.  There were no applications running, and no services taking up memory. According to Microsoft’s own tools, the prefetch and the page file were being touched A LOT.  I can’t imagine that that is good for my battery life…
• Every time I plug into a new network (or change my IP address), it adds a new "Network" to my computer ,and wants me to select one of the three default profiles. I can’t keep the existing firewall profile I JUST setup for the work I want to do.
• 10 distinct clicks to change your IP address.  I provision new network and phone gear.  I have to change my IP address every 10 minutes sometimes..  Oh, and if I want to see if DHCP took, running ipconfig is a test in futility — there are over 100 networks listed!
• Willy-Nilly installing ‘critical’ patches without asking you first. Two weeks ago I was coming home from a conference in Atlanta (read previous entries), and I decided to use the wireless in the airport.  Turn on wireless, hop on, remote desktop to my machine at home to check email, etc.  Turn off laptop and board the plane. While on the plane, I decided to do some work — started writing some articles and presentations.  Our 15 minute landing-warning got announced and I went to shut down the computer.  I hit the button.
  "Please wait while Windows installs update 1 of 15… DO NO SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER". I held out as long as I could, but I ended up just pushing the power button to turn it off as the steward threatened to throw me out the back door because I wasn’t shutting down my computer.

In all honesty, the Dell Inspiron D620 was one of the best laptops I’ve had to date.  Two years of beating the thing to hell and back and it didn’t even show a scratch. The thing that made me switch is the operating system.  Apple has some big shoes to fill in regards to my needs, but if I look at others in my industry, they are all donning the Apple logo too.

So, the Dell already has been sold (I think I asked too low of a price — it was gone to the first taker in like 10 minutes), and the MacBook Pro is on its way!