3 weeks ago I jumped ship from being a long term Windows user to using Mac.  I’d only ever used Macs very briefly, accounting for less than an hour of overall use.

So what was the reason for my switch I hear you asking?

Short answer:

I was fed up of the unreliability of xp and the constant need to format.

Long answer:

1. My Dell Laptop kept crashing and running generally slowly.  As it happens this probably wasn’t entirely xp’s fault as I believe there was a hard drive fault.  However, even before this I had to format every three months or so which really infuriated me.
2. XP was very unexciting and made things which should be fun feel like a chore
3. Viruses and spyware were really irritating - I know you should be careful, not go on those kind of websites etc. but that is sometimes unavoidable!
4. OS X seemed so fresh and fun

I decided to buy a 17″ Macbook Pro which was pretty expensive but I felt worth the money.  Incidentally, I believe this to still be true now.  I was very nervous about forking out that volume of money on something I hadn’t had an enormous amount of experience on (os x).  I can say, hand on heart, that I don’t regret a penny of the purchase as it’s far and away exceeded my expectations.

The process of switching isn’t entirely painless though, I found pretty difficult.  The main thing, which I still struggle with, is the keyboard layout.  I am incredibly used to the UK PC keyboard layout, more specifically my old laptop’s which had quirks of its own.  This may seem like an easy thing to convert to, compared with the totally different ways the operating systems manage programs etc. However, if you use a lot of shortcut keys, which I do, changing these is really difficult. Particularly if they’re in a program which you used to use on a PC, such as Photoshop. Photoshop to me is something which I’ve gotten so used to that I don’t think about what I’m clicking or doing, it just happens. It tends to be a blur of keyboard presses and then something has happened (something which my decrepid old laptop struggled with in it’s dying days).  Photoshop has caused me quite a lot of pain in the transfer but now I have the knack of most of the shortcuts I’m getting on with it better than I ever did on PC.

I shall report back later on with some more comments on my transition and hopefully soon with some designs produced on my shiny new machine!