wirelessZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG

About ninety minutes ago my laptop was hit by a Trojan; a series of impossible-to-close browser windows offering free malware software (which it itself was!) looking like the kind of thing that you get if you accidentally typo a URL and get taken into a near-name-clone porno site. Fortunately, McAfee was on the ball and deleted everything within seconds. I would have started this Editorial immediately afterwards, but the delay was how long it took for McAfee to run a complete scan of my machine.

I'm not running Internet Explorer: I'm currently on Firefox, where this kind of stuff is not supposed to happen and which is, supposedly, a great deal safer than IE. If I was going to stay around the environment maybe I should probably go back to Netscape -- used, for example, by about 0.2% of the visitors to EN-Genius; but there are so many sites now which simply won't load properly, or at all, in Netscape. It's probably now too deep in the noise floor for anybody to be bothered to spend the time to find ways to defeat it!

But, the time for change has come. My faithful Toshiba Satellite has been exhibiting all the signs of dying by heat. Unless the fan is running at full belt it is taking an average of forty-five seconds just to open a file. If it is completely quiet it's like the world of computing is locked up. Seen similar symptoms before, and I don't want to back up every ten seconds to protect myself.

This Toshiba baby has been in service since June 2004, so I guess it has given me a decent run, as modern technology allows.

But where does one go from here? The world of Windows Vista is daunting: there are just too many stories, and I find it impossible to understand how a company that has been in business so long can still produce software that is so totally porous to the outside world. It's as if Microsoft software writers don’t talk to one another at all, don't try to produce a cohesive system, don't have project goals of any kind. Those in the design loop for products know how much that really helps the end results.

Enough suppliers are continuing to offer Windows XP on their machines, so that could be a potential way to go. But one can still see from occasional error messages that the text and basis of XP, behind the whole thing, is still just DOS in some kind of elaborate evening dress. Why would I want to go again to an OS that has already dogged me for the last three years? Yes, it has been better than some previous offerings -- don't want to go there! -- but it is still totally outdated.

No, folks: I'm out of here. Over the weekend I bought a MacBook Pro for myself. Not because I am fond of Steve Jobs. Hardly. But I need something that I can trust; that doesn't behave badly under fire; that updates logically. I cannot afford those ninety minutes of sitting on my hands waiting for McAfee to check me out (attempting any kind of work when a scan is going is an exercise in complete futility).

So, tomorrow, I build a desk and put my spanking brand new Mac on it. When my daughter gets home from school she will teach me how to load stuff and get me going. As a strictly Microsoft Office and Acrobat user I have a little to learn -- and possibly a lot to confuse my analog-saturated technology brain.

This is my last Editorial on a PC. Being non-PC is something I have been branded as for a long time -- so there's nothing really new.