OK, long time no update.
After many years of using Windows PCs, I’m starting to look for an alternative platform. There’s no single big reason for this, just an accumulation of little reasons. I’m sick of little things not working properly (my PC reboots instead of powering off when shut down, a new graphics card I bought simply crashed it when installed and I never got it working, a USB2 card I bought isn’t working yet, hibernating doesn’t work, Internet Explorer crashes occasionally, sometimes applications won’t start up when the PC boots and I have to reboot it, sometimes the PC locks up on startup, sometimes Explorer.exe crashes, USB disks sometimes don’t show up, sometimes apps lock up and can’t be killed, …).
My current PC is getting old and slow, and the only economic way to upgrade is to buy a whole new PC. The thought of reinstalling all my Windows applications and settings is daunting. It really wouldn’t take a lot more effort to switch to a different operating system (and even hardware platform) and start again.
The concept of having Unix on my desktop PC is enticing, but I haven’t seen a Linux distribution yet that I’d like to use as my everyday platform. Linux is great for servers etc, but its usability is worse than Windows for general desktop computing. So Apple’s OS X is looking like an option worth exploring.
I’ll write about my OS X experiences, in case anybody is interested.