My NEW Baby!

Well, it finally happened!  After 6+ years of joyful experience with my last iMac, and only ONE scare in that entire time (2 months ago), my trusty friend died last Saturday!  It is currently resting in peace on the floor of the garage, where it's awaiting disposal.  I need to wipe it clean of its contents first, and frankly, I don't know how to do that.

I had Jamie from Computer Medics come in December to help me when it first gave signs of its impending demise.  He loaded Super Duper to back up all the files EVERY night, so I was less concerned about the loss of my 6+ years of files and junk that one inevitably accumulates in that time period.  And so it ran - truly without difficulty - from that time.  Last week, it seemed a bit touchy, and on Saturday, it just kept telling me to "Please restart!"  How polite!

I restarted many times, ran the Utilities, ran it from the Disk Utilities, and finally when the veil literally came down, I succumbed to its demise.  Prior to that, I had researched my next computer, and had already decided that once a Mac person, always a Mac person.  But the final decision was a no-brainer!

Early last year, when my husband's almost 6 year old Dell died, he promptly ordered a new Dell!  He's thrifty and not a Mac person, so that was a no-brainer decision  on his part.  The Dell came several days later, and I - the computer tech in our household - had the task of getting it up and running.  Not so simple!

The "thing," as I came to not so affectionately call it, set up and started fine.  But when we went to connect to the Internet, not so fine!  The old one had been hard-wired to the modem and router.  The new one had NO co-axial cable to connect to anything!  I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that I spent TEN hours over THREE days talking to Michael in India - only to arrive at a work-around and not a solution to the problem.  The result: my DH has to manually connect it to the Internet every morning and every time it sits idle for x number of hours.

At the conclusion of the 10 wasted hours, I concluded:

• that the router (an Apple product) and modem (Time Warner) were old, so it seemed that when the time came for me to have a new computer, I would need to buy all these new peripherals and have someone come to connect everything for us.
• that I WOULD indeed buy another Mac for my use, despite the cost!

As I ended my "friendship" with Michael that day, I said to him: "I'm sorry to say to you that after this experience, I am now reconvinced that my next computer WILL indeed be another iMac!"  And my husband, who was sitting in the adjoining family room, piped in,"ME TOO!"  THAT is the power of the Mac.

And the end of the story.......I went out last Saturday, same day as the final rest of my old, trusty friend, and bought a new iMac.  I carried it home in one smallish box, set it up in the emptied space, plugged in the ONE cord, and VOILA, it identified our router and modem, connected itself to the Internet, found my old printer, and I was up and running in minutes.

It is a brand new operating system (Lion), and that is giving me some learning curve issues, but by and large......my advice: Buy a MAC!  You won't be sorry! It's worth the cost!