Mac-anized

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 in our forums, available at the link below.

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