A friend of mine recently approached me about upgrading from her Atari 1040 to a sensible computer. I naturally suggested going the Mac route, and she asked me about why PCs seemed to be cheaper, more common, more compatible etc. Well, I evangelised as I have never evangelised before, and eventually I made her see the Light and the True Way. She went off and phoned around, and eventually she ordered a G4 with a few jolly peripherals; CD writer, printer etc. The dealer shortly rang her to say they couldn't find a bezel for her internal Zip drive, so we spoke to an Apple service centre who quoted a very reasonable 17 pounds, which the dealer agreed to knock off the order.
However, when she came to order the bezel, Apple tried to extract another 75 pounds for the bezel installation. She was livid. She cancelled the order for the Mac and fumed she was going to the Gateway shop the next day to buy a PC. She's the kind of person who is a bit fearsome when she's livid, so I stayed a bit quiet. Nice one, Apple.
By the next day she had calmed down a bit, but she still went off to Gateway. Their shop was a bit quiet, and she went through her requirements at length with the salesman, and in passing, told him about her Apple saga. Then she asked what he recommended.
"If I were you," said this delightfully honest Gateway employee, "I'd buy the Mac".
To which I can only add an exclamation mark.
(Pete Griffin)
On the day before Bill Gates released Windows 95 to the world, FED EX delivered a Mac Performa 631CD and Stylewriter printer to my 82 year old mother, who lives alone in Florida (a gift from me). When I called her the next day to ask about needing help, she had already hooked it up and printed the Read Me files without help. I later read that on that same day the Microsoft help lines were clogged with calls from Windows 95 users requesting assistance. That's what I like about a Mac!
One morning around 5 am, I heard the Mac boot up. Not unusual in this household, since my five and three year old usually play games before school. However, on this day, I rolled over and the house was still dark and there was no chatter about...my wife just beginning to awaken. We looked at each other and simultaneously got up to look and to our amazement, our 20 month old, Wyatt, was on top of the desk, mouse in hand! She was playing inside one of the interactive books! We knew she had been watching her sisters, not getting half a chance to play, but today, she woke up before they could bully her out of the way and put her curiosity to the test. I could not believe my eyes, so later that day, with video in hand I asked Wyatt to "show me how to play on the computer." With a casual, "okay", off she went to the computer. She hopped on the chair, climbed on top of the desk and pushed the upper right hand button without hesitation. Once in the Finder, she located the cd and "double clicked" her story! She then proceed to click "let me play" and off she went! Now, she is becoming as adept as the other two, except for her obvious disadvantage with language, and has earned equal time on the computer. She has her own At Ease folder and can navigate through it, locate the Finder to play her cd books. Its a wonderful thing to see, really. Macintosh has achieved the ultimate goal in computer friendliness by making the operation of personal computers, "childsplay". Windows 95 could only hope to be as faciliting as the Macs were even years ago. As an aside, I tried to call Apple's corporate offices later that week, but I could not get through. I am grateful, however, to be able to relay my story now and say "thank you" for creating this avenue of learning for my children. It has been worth every penny of our investment.
Like probably everyone else on the list, I love my Mac!!!! But, if it weren't for MS and the Wintel platform in general, I wouldn't have a job...(systems admin), so I find it necessary to keep a couple of Windoze machines up and running (as much as possible) at the house. Over the weekend, my main win2k pro box's trackball went out. After a quick trip to my local computer mega-retailer, I returned home with a Microsoft Intellipoint Optical trackball....(was on sale, so it ended up $10-15 cheaper than any other comparable trackball, how very un MS-like. The most interesting thing about it that sparked my interest was the statement on the box that in addition to all ps/2 capable pc operating systems supported, the trackball was "Mac compatible".
OK, Microsoft is making a seemingly concerted effort to woo back the once faithful Mac users.....I'll bite....
Much to my surprise, the software (extensions and cp's on the mac) installed by the dual platform installation cd worked better on the Mac than on MS's premier workstation operating system. On the Win2kPro box, I had to manually go in and tell the software which version of the Intellipoint device I had, while the Mac recognized the exact model I had and had a nicer control panel/configuration app for customization.
Interesting.....
(Ian)
My father works as a police officer at the police department in Haarlem, a medium-sized city in the Netherlands. Recently, this once all-Mac department made the switch to Windows NT4. That was the sad part of this story. Now the TWO funny parts.
1. My father needs a computer in his office where he can edit films, scan fingerprints at VERY high resolutions, and with LOTS of raw power for these tasks to perform SMOOTHLY. Since the whole department is Windows NT ONLY now, he can't have a computer running NT4 to import DV-streams, because NT 4 doesn't support FireWire (nor does it support USB, by the way). My father (as we all are in the family) is a true Mac-head, and therefore would LOVE a G4 to do the stuff he needs. We both know that a G4 is extremely capable of doing it, but he won't get one, because they don't 'do' Macs anymore. Not even when they came with the total cost-picture for the PC (about to become the ONLY computer in the WHOLE department running Windows 2000, because of the USB and FireWire connectivity my dad needs) with all those features, saying it would cost them about F20000 (about $10000). When my father showed them that a G4 (with SCSI-controller), which can do all the needed stuff OUT OF THE BOX, costing only about F10000 (some $5000), being only HALF the price of the PC, the people who want him to take the PC could only laugh sourly. Very funny...
2. The department attracted a new senior-system engineer. He would get full control over the network (being not only the city, but the whole district) and would get a BIG PC. He refused it, saying he would leave if he didn't get a G4. He said he would be UNABLE to control the whole intranet using a PC, and really NEEDED a Mac (a MP G4, preferrably). Guess what? He got one. And now the department, which is supposed to be Windows NT4-only, is actually being controlled by a Macintosh G4. Quite hysterious, if you ask me, really...
Just my F0,02.
PS: A good friend of mine got his Windows 2000-computer to crash REAL bad, when Windows, at startup, didn't recognize it's own swap file. Therefore, the PC wouldn't do ANYTHING at all anymore. How's that possible for a system that's supposedly UNCRASHABLE, if you believe both the press and Microsoft?!
(Harro Jansz)
It's been 3 nights of hell doing this ongoing house call, and a relief to return home to a well integrated iMac. Actually, it was the iMac that made the happy ending possible. Here's the tale:
A client of mine has a Compaq Deskpro EN series. It has a 6 gig hard drive. It also has a BIOS that only recognizes 2 gig partitions, therefore certain BIOS fix files need to be present in the root folder of his hard disk for him to use the hard drive at all. 3 nights ago he accidentally deleted those files. They installed by default without system or read-only attributes thus no special warning was given when they were being... erm... disposed of. :) So what happened to his setup? Well, the computer booted up with the classic, "Non system disk" error. The BIOS no longer knew how to address his 6 gig partition, since it only knew how to read 2 gig setups. Even a bootable floppy disk with fdisk.exe on it revealed a 6 gig hard drive, but no C prompt. The only prompt a Wintel user ever recognizes, when its gone, the computer is basically DEAD to them. So logically I had to either download the BIOS patch off of Western Digital's website on my iMac, and get the fix onto a floppy (using Imation's external drive of course), or just use fdisk to create 3x2 gig partitions. The Western Software wouldn't work the way it claimed, (it even reported the Bios fix properly installed, but continued to create 2 gig partitions!) so I ended up splitting the 6 gigs up manually. Ok, we have a bootable C drive now (formatted /s of course) and we're all set to install Win95! Oh wait, no CDROM drivers...no access to the CDROM. Great. Back to the iMac and a trip online to get those. Considering how drives are placed in a Compaq Deskpro, you can't see the manufacturer's sticker on the CDROM without taking out the CDROM physically, so I just included a 2 floppy set of about 25 different drivers to try. I found the right one after 8 reboots.
Finally Win95 is installed! Did the hardware recognize properly? Of course not. His copy of Win95 was too old to have the Ethernet card and ATI Rage 128 hardware drivers. Back to the iMac once again, this time to Compaq's website to get the drivers for that. But this time the Ethernet and ATI drivers were multi-megabyte archives. So, off to www.download.com to find a windows file splitter. So the process was, download the software, put it into VirtualPC, split the files onto multiple floppies, bring those floppies and the file splitting software to the Compaq, install the splitter, rejoin the files from those floppies and install the drivers finally. Now, the poor victim of this whole fiasco assured me he made backups of all his software. The poor soul backed up the Program Files folder which only contains the .EXE files, not the DLLs, VXDs, registry entries etc. He didn't have the original installation executables either. So in the end, his 6 CD archive was a waste. Fortunately I had a CD from an old PC magazine that had Netscape Navigator 4.0 on it for him to install and start downloading. :)
At the end of it all, he was in amazement at the effort required to get him up and running again. Of course the easy way would have been for him to just order a replacement Software Restore CD from Compaq (his was conveniently lost) but considering he runs his home business on his computer (as many people do), who has time to wait 4 weeks for some CD to arrive in the mail? Just a wonderful PC world tale that is all too common.
(Darcy)
Reinstalling the Wintel operation system is nothing like reinstalling a Mac OS. It is, itself, excruciatingly painful. I had to reinstall Windows 95 on my PC and it kept asking for missing "cab" files. I got the job done with the help of tech. support but it never ran the same until my hard drive just died and I had the manufacturer replace it with Windows 95 installed on it. I had to reinstall OS 9 several times when I first got my iBook and I had a few problems. It was so easy, I couldn't believe it!
(Fran)
I'm responsible for a number of computers at the place I work, unfortunately although myself and a good number of staff use Macintosh machines at home, work won't budge on shifting from Wintel boxes which amongst other things handle the duty of being a fax server.
We started having trouble with Win98 and it's ability to keep our Hotfax installation running for any period of time. This meant we had no incoming faxes overnight when the machines were unsupervised and the software was crashing. Additionally we began having email difficulty with email (virus problems being one of the culprits). So now we had no fax or email coming in and both are pretty important for recieving information on technical updates we need for our work.
I managed to come up with a solution for the problem...
I use an Apple Newton 2100, with the PC's down I hooked my PDA into the mains via my adaptor and set it up to singlehandedly take on the incoming fax duties. While I was at I used a Newton program called SimpleMail to logon to the work email accounts at regular intervals throughout the night and retrieve our email.
The Newton did not crash once and retrieved everything it was supposed to do, flawlessly. I replaced the Newton with one of my older models and we went on like this for a couple of weeks while I did some refurbishment to the dreaded Wintel boxes. If anything was needed on hard copy the Newton was capable of printing to a variety of printers in our workshop. In the end I managed to scrounge an old Centris from someone which had a bad VRAM chip. I've now got an email/fax server (although it does run in black and white).
The Newton might not be a Mac but I like to think of this fledgling PDA as it's little brother, and a bit of a workhorse at that too.
(Adrian Carter)
Mac users need not feel any animosity towards pc users with WinME. We should be VERY sympathetic. I've recently spent a few hours reading a WinME newsgroup and the list of horror stories grows quicker than I can summarize them! My favorites (with a taint of sadism) include the following:
1-The IRQ problem: it seems that there are still great conflicts with IRQs assigned to IDE controllers, BIOS versions, Plug and Play, Sound cards etc. Installing an audio card can disable your IDE controller and vice versa. This is happening because WinME doesn't seem to handle legacy ISA (16-bit) slots that can still be produced on current motherboards that are WinMe compatible. Solution? Become an expert in your mother board's date of manufacture, model number, BIOS maker, blah blah blah. So a genius is required for installing a sound card these days.
2-The 'new' system restore feature: it seems that this new background process of protecting .dll files that are essential to the operating system in light of people's habits of installing nasty software, is preventing firewall software from functioning properly. Imagine the joy of installing a firewall utility that WinMe reports is a virus attempting to change its system files, and refuses to boot and tells you so in the infamous 'blue screen'. Solution? Reformat and reinstall Windows.
3-CAB files: this compression scheme that is apparently gaining momentum outside of Microsoft's digital press is still dreadfully problematic. Although WinME is advertised as being DOS legacy free...guess what you need to extract a system file from a .cab archive to replace a corrupt one when the system won't boot? DOS!!!!! The problem worsens when the only system software restore CD you have is from your computer's reseller (IBM, Gateway etc.) and uses its own proprietary methods of extracting from archives. Solution? Reformat and restore everything just to get that one silly file.
4-TweakUI: this nifty GUI hacker is getting real popular and is wreaking havoc on WinME systems. This software is comparable to ResEdit and in the hands of a PC users who believes Microsoft's marketing of a super safe and protected operating system.... bingo. Solution? Finding someone who knows how to write custom registry keys to restore a user's meddling dammage. OR reformat and reinstall. I think TweakUI should fatten their disclaimer a little. We've learned this lesson already haven't we?
5-FileType and associations: it amazes me that even after 6 years of Windows products, the file/app system is still phazing their users. People continue to ignore the question, "would you like to associate all files of the .xxx type with this application?" during a software installation process and just got clicking away on the 'Next' button. What makes matters worse, is that MANY Windows applications ask this question and developpers haven't moved to improve this fundamental thing. Solution? Reinstall the OTHER program that you had preferred open a certain file type. Sometimes we just take our Macs for granted....
(Cheers Darcy)
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