Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Vote Republican? I hope you are not that desperate.

Not to rub it in, but ...when people say that Macs cost more than PCs, they forget that my time, to me, is worth quite a lot more than $0 per hour.

Ouch Betsy. I've taken a different approach. I don't own a desktop machine, but I have multiple laptops running XP, Win2K, Win98, Win95, DOS and RedHat 9.0. I refused to be taken out of business by a technical glitch. ;-)

Ken: If you could explain how you actually manage to keep all your data manageable using multiple machines I'd be greatly appreciative! Im having diffiults with just a desktop and a laptop!

Glad the computers working now though, and if you truely do decide to get the mac I'd gladly accept your hardware donations :)

Don't get a Mac, get a brand name PC. It's a confusion I see all tht time. Take my PC for example. It's an HP Vectra I bought in Israel. All the parts were assembled in factory so they were tested for compatibility. I got a diagnostics disk that tests all the parts and can tell me what's wrong. Since is was considered a "business" machine, I got a three years insurance where the technitian comes to my (rural) home and replaces parts if needed. The machine comes with a preinstalled OS so I know that all the cards have the correct drivers. Sound like a Mac, but it's a PC.

I also keep my work on two machines plus occasional CD backups. My beat-up old laptop sits on the kitchen table, and my nice shiny Ti Powerbook lives upstairs in my study. It's easy to send files back and forth. If one of them dies--the laptop had battery trouble last year--the other one keep me going. Mine are both Macs, but you could do the same with one Mac and one PC.

I have you beat, Betsy. I keep three machines (four, if you count our daughter's laptop): my desktop, the kids' desktop, and my PC. I back up every night from one to the other. (Does "triple redundancy" mean 3 backups or 6? Well, never mind.)

I understand the wisdom of buying a brand name machine. But I don't want to rebuild my sw environment, so I either buy it without hard drives or I clone my existing ones and throw them out. The first alternative introduces instability and the second is a waste.

Besides, I've been assembling my own PCs since the late '80s. Have we now reached the point where a home hobbyist like me can't do that any more? Has it gotten that complex? (This isn't a criticism, just a sober marking of a passage.)

Oh yeah? I'll see your four and raise you two: my beloved two, plus Frank's desktop (nice big screen I use for big editing), his new and old laptops, and my almost moribund Win95 machine I use for QuickBooks.