BurbleChaz

Eighteen months ago I bought a shiny new Hewlett Packard dv9000 'laptop'. I've been delighted with it. The 17-inch screen was amazing, it was faster than a greased weasel, it had more disk than you could shake a stick at, and it ran a bunch of operating systems smoothly. Regrettably, its excellence in performance was somewhat marred by a lack of reliability.

On several occasions, it simply refused to boot. No life anywhere. Several calls to HP support eventually led to a frankly incredible diagnosis. Apparently, this four-kilo desktop replacement was not capable of sustained operation on mains supply. Apparenty, the battery would overvolt, leading to the system failing to boot. Astonishing to comprehend, the engineers at HP have designed a machine whith a complete mismatch between battery and system. Discharging the battery did seem to work, so it may actually have been the cause.

Later, in the deep cold of Melbourne winter. the machine started suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. It wouldn't boot unless the CPU was over about 18 degrees. Every morning, I would boot it, it would run through POST, attempt to start an operating system, then the kernel would panic. Linux, Windows, Solaris, all the same. After a couple of goes, it would start fine. Now, try explaining this to tech support. "Try rebooting", they say. "Try again", they go. After three goes, it works. Result. Ticket closed. Another furious customer.

On Wednesday evening, the next major fault slithered up from the nebulous depths. Every 20 minutes or so, it started bluescreening in Windows. Each time, the same driver was crashing at the same point. The kernel-mode (Ring 0) nVidia graphics driver was making outrageous assumptions about the hardware. Little things like it being a) present and b)undamaged. Wrong. After a certain amount of panic (by me and the kernel), I retrieved all the data I needed. (When I say "I" here, I mean of course, the other geek).

Regretfully, mourning an excellent if feckless friend, we went shopping on Thursday evening. Since I Will Not Ever Pay Actual Cash Money for Windows Vista, the hardware landscape was more straightforward then the last time I did this. The Apple Store is but a short hop from the office. My intention was to buy a shiny, tiny black MacBook: 13-inch screen and utterly lovely. Then, the siren song of Macbook Pro called me to its lustrous 17-inch screen. Sadly, even these screens are not as good as the one on my lovely, faithless HP. Sadness. Thought. Rational cogitation. Hah. In an Apple shop? If I were rational, I'd be homebuilding a commodity Linux box, and liking it. The Cult of Steve is not about 'rational'. Over to the larger machines. How often to I actually carry my laptop around? And the screen on the 20-inch iMac is drop-dead stunning. After a few minutes of autopersuasion, I'm ready to sign up. It's cheaper than the laptop, it's faster, shinier and the screen sucks you in like a rip current. The (excellent) salesdude totters of to arrange a RAM upgrade. Then, I turn round. A few minutes later, I become aware of an insistent tugging at my sleeve. The salesdude is telling me that the RAM isn't available, or something. I can't hear him. I have fallen into the vortex. It was the same price as a reasonably-upspiffed 13-inch Macbook. Twice the RAM. Much, much faster. And almost four times the screen area. Twenty Four Inch Screen. iMac. 2x2.8GHz CPUs. 2GB Ram. Two feet across. Twenty. Four. Inches.

Here it is:

Lugging this up the hill was no fun at all.

From box to running, installed, networked jewel of awesomeness was five minutes. Yes, reader, I am a fanboy.

Kneel before the awesome shininess of the iMac.

Next, to set it up. With a wired connection to the router, on went the simple, bare necessities: OpenOffice, Firefox, Aquamacs, Skype, Camino, software update, World of Warcraft, what was the download limit again?

Guess which day I bought the iMac?

This all started about three years ago when I bought an iPod as a Christmas present. Now I'm a Steve Jobs fanboy. Ponytail, check. Trendy surfgear, check. Strong opinions about computing hardware, check. The stupid goatee beard and desire for a triple-mocha soy latte have not, thankfully, been detected so far. You will be kept informed.