My home laptop died last week, after weeks of slowing down and almost daily "blue screens of death." The computer, a Dell Inspiron, lasted about eight years, and given the phenomenal changes in performance and technology since 2001, that Dell had a very good run. I can't complain. Unfortunately, the last backup I performed was in March, so I lost seven months of photos and documents—some of which I was able to recover from e-mails I sent and from sites such as Flickr, where I posted some of the photos. (My writing is all done with pen and paper first, so that was also retrievable.) But the rest was lost forever. Let this be a lesson to all writers out there: Back up your files often!

So an emergency purchase was in order to get me back online. We use Macs at work, which I love for ease of use, but I always assumed I'd have a PC at home. Mobility is important, since I don't have a fixed spot at home for a desktop, so I went out looking for another laptop. As luck would have it, Windows 7 was just released, and so there were a number of new computers to look at. And yet I ended up with ... a new iMac. It's light enough to move around (and it's in one piece, apart from the wireless—and cordless—mouse and keyboard). It's more powerful than the best laptop I saw, and the screen is bigger too. There is less to worry about regarding viruses. It's completely silent (no annoying fan noise), it's easy to use—and it took about 3 minutes to set up. I'm a convert.

Macintosh reportedly has about a 14 percent market share and is especially popular with artists and graphic designers. But do writers favor Mac as well? Let us know what you think by posting a response here in the forum.

--Jeff Reich, editor