MacBook Watch

This post came from an email I received the other day from Brian M. who wanted to share his experience as someone who switched from a PC to Mac and what it was like to return to the Windows environment:

A few months ago I got my new 13" Aluminum Macbook in the mail for my 40th birthday gift. As a life long Windows user you may ask why I made the switch. That is easy, I was bored with Windows!

A friend of mine has the cheap white Macbook and I played around with it one night. I must say I was a bit lost on how to use Leopard. Although I was interested in learning about OS X, I wasn't that impressed with the white plastic Macbook. When Apple released the Unibody Macbooks I had to check it out myself. After a lot of research I decided to plunge in to the all but foreign world of  the Mac user.

I wasn't as lost this time on Leopard because while I was waiting for my birthday to arrive (my wife was getting it for me as a gift so I had to wait) I did some research about the differences between a PC and a Mac.

Fast forward to the present. The other day my son came over sporting his new Dell netbook. He called it a "lollipop" which I found out later wasn't actually the brand name but comes from the Dell commercial that goes to the tune of lollipop or something like that. At first look I thought it was a portable Dvd player. It had a 10" screen and was tiny. I included a stock picture for you to see.

I fired this baby up to see what was going on. Windows XP came preinstalled and when it finally booted up with what seemed like an eternity I was shocked to see all the junk on the desktop and what was running in the taskbar. I asked my son what all this was and he said "I don't know it came with the computer". I preceded to browse around and realized I was already missing my Macbook. Finally I asked him if he minded if I removed all the junk and try to speed things up. The first thing I did was removed all of the trialware.

bloated Norton trialware

The first thing to go on the Dell Mini was the bloated Norton Anti-virus trialware which I had replaced with the free AVG Antivirus. After that it was just a matter of the rest of the junk and also turn off all the unnecessary programs running in the background at start-up.

I rebooted the system and when Windows finally started I was pleased to see that things where running much smoother and faster. I gave the netbook back to my son and he exclaimed "What did you do? It's so much faster now". I simply told him Windows unlike OS X needs a little tweaking when you first pull it out of the box.

A Mac is ready to go right out of the box

After he left I realized how much I didn't miss Windows. When I first booted up my new Macbook it was ready to go like they say "right out of the box". The only thing it did was run software update to make sure OS X was up to date. There was no trialware to uninstall and no bloatware to deal with. With that being said I will say that Windows (with a little tweaking) can be a good operating system, but why settle for good when OS X is great with no work on your part at all.

Thank you Brian for the email. If anyone else recently switched from a PC to a Mac and would like to share their experience be sure to send them our way.