As someone who works, at least part time, as a design professional, I come into Mac fans on an almost daily basis. Sadly, whilst Apple products are generally rather good, they are intrinsically spoiled by their legion of unquestioning followers. You’ve probably met them. A conversation with a member of the Apple harem will go roughly like this:

Me, working on my laptop.
Mac fan: Why are you using a PC? You need to use a mac. SOOO much faster.
Me: Really? Isn’t that a Macbook Air – aren’t they pretty underpowered…
Mac fan: Nope, fast as lightning. Mac OSX literally makes the electrons in processors and RAM function at a higher velocity.
Me: Ok.
Mac fan: Seriously, why are you still using that steaming pile of failure? I’ve had Macs ten years, and I’ve never had one crash on me. I bet your Windoze heap is crashing right now!
Me: Actually, I’ve found Win7 pretty good. And OSX has crashed on me frequently.
Mac fan: No. It hasn’t.
Me: Sorry? Are you overuling my ability to discern truth?
Mac fan: WHY HAVEN’T YOU BOUGHT A MAC YET?!
Me: Well, I feel they are somewhat overpriced; I don’t really like how they look, nor do I find them ergonomic; I don’t like the operating system, I feel it doesn’t provide as good a workflow as Windows; the warranties are overpriced and underfeatured, and in my experience, overutilitised; I’m happy with my current machine…
Mac fan, screams and eats my PC.

Obviously, this is an exaggeration. Although the exaggeration is mostly on my side. Many Mac fanboys are really that bad, but I’m rarely as gentle and understated. In fact, I generally take the time to point out every single failing of Macs, in my opinion, and an explanation of how each point is adequately countered by Windows/Linux. I have become so insistent on the matter, I have turned into a mirror of the exact thing I despise – an anti-Mac fanboy.

Clearly, this is not a positive thing for my life. I don’t want to enter into arguments with people who, besides their weird quasi-religious dedication to an particular technology company, probably have a lot in common with me.

I don’t want to be that person, so I am going to use the mightiest weapon in my arsenal: grace. From this day forwards, unless specifically asked on my opinion, I am going to attempt not to voice my feelings on the matter.

If I break this promise, I promise to buy this machine (probably).

See you around, whatever hardware you use!
Chris

PS. Yes, I took the survey below. I was, I’ll admit, slightly disappointed not to score zero.

2%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Yes, the title of this post is a palindrome, as a metaphor for the backwards and forwards nature of the problem I’m experiencing. You see, my computer has BSODed about once a fortnight for the last few months. That’s a Blue Screen of Death, for those of you not geek enough – its where your computer displays an error message, then turns itself off.

Now, I’m used to this – since almost every single computer I have ever owned has crashed on occasion: Windows, Linux, Mac (Yes, Macs crash too!), Android, Palm OS, EPOC, SIBO…

In fact, the only one that never failed me was my BBC Micro: but then I only really used that to play games; mostly Dare Devil Denis and Invaders. It also has something to do with that fact that the whole operating system and games combined came to about 60Kb. In comparison, this webpage is approximately 120Kb and a basic Windows 7 install is 20Gb, or 333,000x larger than the BBC OS and games combined.

So I expect computers to crash. But I also expect to be able to find out the cause and sort it out. In fact, Windows 7 has an excellent automated error reporting and solving program built in, meaning that it should be sorting itself out. Unfortunately, mine doesn’t seem to work. It tries to connect to the service, then tells me ”Problem connecting to the Windows Error Reporting service. Some of the reports could not be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service. Please try again later“.

Needless to say, I tried again later, with no particularly helpful effects. Some forums advised me to turn off my firewall – not the best long term solution – and another advising allowing Performance Logs and Alerts through the firewall, which did not work either. I have tried a system file check, and a clean reboot, and am now out of ideas, and recommendations.

At this point I throw myself into the helpful arms of the internet – anyone got any ideas?

If, like me, you have Windows 7 (or Vista) 64 bit installed, you may have noticed an annoying glitch – whilst the file previews are much better than they ever were in XP, they can’t quite manage PDFs. You get a funky message in fact:

This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:
PDF Preview Handler for Vista
To open this file in its own program, double-click it.

For the last 6 months, I’ve just kind of ignored this. But I finally got annoyed enough with it to try and find a solution. As with most of these things, 3 seconds on google found me the answer.

1. Go to this website.
2. Download the patch.
3. Run it.

Sorted. It will update your registry to make thumbnails and previews work, making your life at least 3% better.

I have just finished the resits for my finals (after failing them so impressively last time). I don’t know whether I pass until Monday, so for now I get to be geeky normal me again.

So, I would like to introduce my latest purchase, the excellent, non crashy and productivity increasing Display Fusion Pro. It‘s a multi monitor taskbar. To the vast majority of you, this will mean very little, but to those of you who use more than one screen with Windows, its a godsend.

Cool features:

• Can be arranged, sized and styled like the normal Windows taskbar.
• Automatically only shows the programs open on the relevant window, and takes them off the main taskbar.
• Allows multiple wallpapers, random changes or just a single wallpaper stretched across 57 screens (probably).
• Only £15.62

My only regret with this program is that it’s necessary. I had hoped that 10 years after XP, Microsoft would have provided better multiple monitor support out of the box. And its not like at least 357 people agree with me.

Anyway, check out the software at http://www.displayfusion.com/ – there’s a 30 day trial, so you can see that I am right, and you cannot realistically live without this software – unless Microsoft actually listen to consumers, but me and 211,416 other people think that seems unlikely.

Update

Jon Tackabury, the owner and lead developer of all the Binary Fortress software has posted a link to this on his twitter feed. Check him out at twitter.com/jtackabury.

Another update

The license agreement has been updated, with free, standard, personal pro and company pro licenses. Cheers to Jon for the free upgrade!

So, I have finished my exams. And that leaves me a few short weeks to tackle a variety of projects. Taking inspiration from Lifehacker, I am making a list on here of stuff I am aiming to achieve.

1. Get healthy: The next 7 weeks, my first hour of each day is exercise. Keep me accountable on this one please!
2. A new YesIts.Us website: The Lowry Family homepage, in full technicolor. Need to update this, and create a blog for my darling wife.
3. Install Windows 7 on my PC: I only bought it 5 months ago, and already I feel I should probably install it!
4. Make VictorandRachel.co.uk: A wedding site for my housemate.
5. Do some more work on Cutting Edge: my large corporate project has been put on hold, but that’s no excuse not to do anything on it.
6. Finish CrookesOnline.co.uk: Let’s get the Crookes homepage up and running for everyone!
7. A new NamesNotNumbers.info: Everyone’s favourite charity, soon getting a new website. Design by committee – the best way!
8. Get my server set up: It’s working fine, but its time to get that software running properly, with regular backups, and every PC in the house being served!
9. Redesign ChristianPunks.co.uk: This site is no longer an active portal, so let’s make it a little more fresh and helpful!
10. Start a peer reviewed journal: Coming soon – The Online Journal of Medicine (also known as OnJoM).
11. Get tagging: Put post tags on every post on my blog.
12. Sleep.
13. Walk the dogs.

Anyone else think this risks burnout? I will take regular breaks, don’t worry! And now I will leave you with what must be the world’s best CV – click the picture below to find out more…

we are in

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