When I turned on my IBM Thinkpad last Monday night (right after the
firework to do my homework), what I saw was that dreaded Blue Screen of
Death. It said something to the effect of "Interrupt 5 Error, Windows
kernel panic." The next thing I knew, the Wi-Fi stopped working and for
some reason, the ethernet and power management were affected as well.
This isn't very good considering that (1) I don't have time to mess
with this shit, (2) this is the second lemon that I had with PC laptops
this year. The good news is that it is an IBM and their service is
good. The bad news is, based on my experience, it takes at least a week
to get the computer fixed and I really need a computer for school. I
tried fixing the laptop for the next 12 hours but it was both futile
and frustrating. As a last resort, I decided to abandon the evil empire
of PC and move onto the greener pasture of Mac. Yes, I have decided to
embrace the Mac by acquiring a powerbook 12" on a special education
promotion by Apple.
The PC applications that we need to use in the SDM program are:
Excel, Word, Matlab, AIM (Trillian), and Web browser (Firefox or IE).
Well... These applications are also available on the Mac as well!!! In
the last 6 months, I have witnessed Matti and Dave used their Mac at
MIT without any problems. Now that I no longer doing any software
development on the PC, I am free of any allegiance to the PC/Windows
platform. So goodbye spyware, plug-n-pray, Windoze, and virus, and
hello Mac.