Pain and Misery

What a truly gut-wrenching, heart-rending experience.  Windows XP Professional no longer recognizes the boot volume on my PC's c: drive.  That's Personal Computer, nothing to do with politics, in as much as anything has to do with the other in the great cosmic space-time continuum with the dark matter and correlations of incidence......back to the point, or should I say "back-up", which I ruefully admit I wish I had done much more frequently.  The old lap-top is at the local computer shop.  The tech thinks he may be able to get the thing to work or at least recover my data files.  I hope so, our life is on that hard drive.  He promised to get back to me early this coming week to let me know the status.

So how am I posting to this blog, you ask?  Well, living even for one day without access to the 'Net and e-mail was more than we could stand.  And since we've been through several hard drive failures and other aggravations with Windows-based units, we drove over to the nearest Best Buy (about 90 miles away) and bought a new MacBook.  It's wonderful.  Easy to use, packed with applications, a built-in camera, speech technology, just head and shoulders over the Windows-based computer.  

Of course, I do have a stand-alone hard disc with some back-up data that I was able to transfer to the Mac.  And there's a program called Boot-Camp that allows XP to run on the Mac too.  So I figured I'd install XP.  WRONG!!!!  The installation froze my Mac.  I couldn't even get the stupid CD out of the drive.  Fortunately the instruction booklet that came with the Mac had instructions for that particular emergency.  Of course it took several minutes of, and this is an understatement, PANICKED searching for any clue to restore the MacBook to its pristine condition after being despoiled by Windows.  Now I hope the local techies can fix the old lap-top enough that I can load all its data onto my home network and never again besmirch my Mac with XP.

By the way, I haven't gotten a cent from Steve Jobs for this post and I do still admire Bill Gates.  It's just after all those years of Commodore 64, Apple II, and the various Intel-based DOS/Windows machines, the new MacBook is truly a phenomenal experience.