I admit it. I’ve looked at the Circuit City and Best Buy ads and considered the $699 laptops and other PC’s and thought that maybe that would be the way to go for my next computer. My Powerbook is aging (3 years) and the HP nc6400 that I do my paid work on is admittedly speedy (and as a 2.33Ghz Core2 Duo it should be). But I can’t do it. I’ll buy another Mac even if it means waiting until I can afford it.Tonight was just one more episode that showed why. Not that I needed another, especially after slowing myself down with Vista (new software project, gotta have it) and suffering through it’s idiotic and never ending User Account Control dialogs (”A program needs your permission to continue…”). Nonetheless…
I’m out of town staying at Mom’s/Grandma’s with my daughter and she and I just want to watch a bedtime movie. I eye the 12″ Powerbook or the 15.5″ widescreen display of the HP. Obviously X-Men 2 will look better on the big screen so we go with it. Put in the DVD, nothing happens. Ok, no problem, I go to the DVD in My Computer and launch from there. The preloaded DVD player from HP comes up and we wait for a a bit until we get the first error message. Then the next error message (same message, DLL xxx failed to initialize), then the next. Finally controller and small playback screen show and it looks like we might see something. No. Briefly we see logo from DVD and then back to blank screen. I press play again. Message flashes on screen about parental settings preventing viewing of this movie and then blank screen again. OK. I’m irritated, but I can find the settings for this and change them. No problem. My daughter, by this time is eyeing the Powerbook and looking understandably anxious, as only an almost 6 year old whose Daddy has just promised something he’s failing to deliver can. And yes, my 5 year 10 month old daughter does love the X-Men. It has chicks with cool superpowers, she can’t get enough.
I look at the settings and find that the Parental block settings are disabled. I enable and then disable them again for good measure. Still no dice. Ok. Give up. I put DVD in dinky 12″ Powerbook. The DVD Player application launches and just automatically starts playing the DVD full screen. A perfect user experience. My daughter is happy and we watch the blue guy with long spiked tail sneak into the Oval office.
Now, I could probably fix the PC laptop and make it behave like I want it to (I think). And yes, it’s been upgraded to Vista from XP and would probably perform better if I did a clean install, or it was a new PC, blah-blah, etc. But the Powerbook is 3 years old (much older than the HP) and has had two major OS upgrades in that time… And still I prefer it over the HP for just about everything. It does what I want and I don’t have to fuck with it.
Time for another Mac.

Geek //