(c) Roger Overall 2008 - www.rogeroverall.com

***UPDATE*** Several regular readers have written in to say that this post is boring and that they skipped straight to the end. Here’s an executive summary of the text for those of you with equally short attention spans: Our waste-of-space/money/time office PCs are being replaced by lovely Apples.

The news that I’ve been waiting for came through a couple of days ago – my Apple has finally fallen from the tree and is on its way. If all goes to plan, it’ll be delivered and installed tomorrow.

I’ve been a PC person all my life, from student to journalist to photographer. It was what I knew, so I stuck with Windows-driven systems. Sure, Macs looked prettier and were built on a more robust operating system with an infinitely more intuitive interface, but they also cost more. Besides, when digital photography took off, software manufacturers developed and released the Windows versions of their software first because that’s where the biggest market was. There was never a killer reason for me to switch. Until now.

I spent a small fortune on a new Windows-based computer system just over two years ago. It was designed to last at least three years and handle a medium-heavy digital work flow.

Gradually, the system choked as new cameras with larger sensors were added to the business, putting heavier demands on the hardware, principally disc space. That, though, was the least of my worries. After all, more disc space is easily added.

Speed became a problem, as the system couldn’t cope properly with the volume of data that needed to be processed. A single file from one of my cameras is 17MB, soon to be increased to 21MB. That’s a lot of bits and bytes. More than the PC was specified to handle, especially using memory and RAM-hungry programs. So, we could have added more RAM, yes? A little bit. Ultimately, though, I would end up nursing the computer through file processing, waiting for it to get to where it needed to go. It struggles so badly, that I’m writing this blog post while it lumbers its way through a pretty straightforward file conversion routine in Lightroom.

A really big issue, though, was reliability. The Windows system just wasn’t reliable. The system came with XP and  it started to act up very quickly. This was odd because an older PC in the office also running on XP has never given us a squeak of trouble. The younger bells-and-whistles upgrade started to become a real problem. At one point, the whole system crashed and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Thank goodness for the older PC in the corner, or we’d have had to shut down completely for three days while the new system was resurrected.

And from then on, the system never worked properly. Programs shut down at random in the middle of a process, or simply won’t open up, or freeze or whatever. I can’t print from any of our Adobe software. Error messages galore. The occasional blue screen with some dire warning about the state of the world/environment/economy/my inside trouser measurement – mostly in language that is made up of English words, but isn’t actually English.

Burning a CD or DVD takes four hours on the PC now. Yes, a whole Gigabyte in an hour. And you’d better not try to do anything else with it at the same time because it won’t let you. This happened before and it took a day to sort out – apparently some of the daily Microsoft security patches/downloads that you get can mess up the system (three today alone); mostly because the guys who write the software, the guys who write the operating system and the guys who make the computer hardware are from different companies. So, some guy in a darkened cubical in Seattle writes the latest update to plug the latest hole in XP and it puts the software written by another guy in another cubical someplace else out of whack and suddenly my DVD burner in Cork doesn’t function.

Let’s not get into the whole virus thing.

The final straw came when the luxury back-up drive we have failed. Our IT provider’s solution to my request for them to come in and put in a new back-up (for which I would have happily paid – in fact, they could have named their price) was to email me a link to the hardware supplier’s website. How’s that for service? Getting the replacement drive is an adventure for another post and the delivered substitute is not what you’d call plug-and-play, so I wasn’t able to install it.

By the way, we run multiple back-up systems in the office, so nothing was really compromised and it just goes to show that you need to back-up your back-up.

So we reached the point were we needed to upgrade the computer system, but with the nightmare reports we were getting from the Vista front, Windows wasn’t looking that hot. So I started ask some questions when I saw Macs in people’s offices – clients and suppliers. Nobody had any problems to relate. In fact, the worst I heard was downtime of half an hour, and I spoke to a lot of people. Then came a conversation with the IT specialist who helped rebuild the PC system when the company I had been dealing with washed their hands of it. He explained that sure Apples are more reliable: the guy writing the operating system and the guy building the computer hardware share a cubicle – chances are, they share it with the guy who writes the software you use as well. Moreover, the OS is based on a far more robust platform than Windows. So, suddenly, you’ve got a more reliable platform and three guys working through the issues over by the water cooler.

And no viruses.

My new Apple system is twice the price of the PC system it is replacing. We’re talking five figures here. However, if it lives up to its billing, it will pay for itself in terms of time savings and reduced downtime.

Yestin, my assistant, will lose out. He is French and will no longer have his English vocabulary enriched with  the choicest vernacular that our rich language has to offer directed Basil-Fawlty-style at the ailing PC. The office will become a place of serenity as the balance between man and machine is restored. At least until I start using the Mac keyboard, which has the @-key in the wrong place and doesn’t even have a #-key. How the hell do Apple users get through life without a #-key?

We will still have a couple of Windows PCs in the office, mainly for admin tasks and for messing with interns heads.