Musings of a Marketing Maven

I’ve now installed Win­dows Vista for the sec­ond or third time on a Mac, and I have to say – Vista runs bet­ter on my Mac­Book Pro than it does on some of my ded­i­cated PCs. I’ve been run­ning Vista on a Mac­Book Pro for over a year, and am still happy.

I con­fess to using Apple’s Boot­camp because I like the forced break when shut­ting down and restart­ing – it helps me shift my men­tal model from Mac to PC, and back again… It only takes a moment to switch when using a fast machine like a Mac­Book Pro.

I’ve tried Vista on what was then a blaz­ingly fast Alien­ware lap­top. Like many early Vista users, I encoun­tered all the dri­ver has­sles and incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties that made the V1 upgrade expe­ri­ence so intolerable.

To make things worse, the graph­ics board maker, Nvidia, never both­ered to upgrade the dri­ver to one that would work with Vista. Being forced to use a generic video dri­ver destroyed most of the value this machine had offered in the first place – my pri­mary rea­son for pay­ing more for this brand and lap­top model than the other alter­na­tives. If I had the time or the incli­na­tion, I’d down­grade the OS to Win­dows XP. But com­pared to a Mac­Book Pro, the Alien­ware lap­top is so heavy it’s just not worth my time to shift it back to XP.

As a cus­tomer I was very dis­ap­pointed to pay top dol­lar for a pre­mium brand and then dis­cover that it wasn’t worth Alienware’s while to update dri­vers on a machine that was barely a year old. That’s the last time I’ll ever buy that brand!

Indeed, when the time came to buy another ded­i­cated PC (to run my busi­ness’ account­ing files), I went with a no-name brand from Wash­ing­ton called Quiet PC in order to get a whisper-quiet PC for my office. The company’s web­site is very geeky, and it was scary to con­fig­ure the PC online, but I’ve been thrilled with the results.

After years of suf­fer­ing with PCs that sound like jet engines tak­ing off, I love shar­ing space with one that I rarely hear. Plus, I like its sub­tle but sophis­ti­cated black case – this PC doesn’t call atten­tion to itself (except for its blink­ing blue LED lights). Because I run my busi­ness out of a home office, quiet good-looking com­put­ers are impor­tant. (Need­less to say, my desk­top Mac is also quiet and good looking.)

Why do I run more than one com­puter at a time? So I can multi-task and jug­gle mul­ti­ple pri­or­i­ties – and be ready for those inevitable client phone calls. Hav­ing to jug­gle dis­parate tasks and dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem mod­els demands men­tal agility while call­ing for bal­anced atten­tion… Like yoga for the brain. It may not suit every­one, but I like it.

Print PDF