Several months ago, my aging Powerbook (Ai G4, approx. 6 years old) began to get a little flaky on me. The USB ports began to work intermittently, various characters on the keyboard required an extra-hard hammer-on to register, and other quirks and oddities. I’m sure it didn’t help that I’d dropped it several times, including an incident back in September or so that jammed the AC power plug a millimeter or so into the body, making it more difficult to accept the plug, and leaving a 3-inch crack in the lower left-hand corner of the LCD that was plainly visible during use.

It was around this time that I began my search for a new laptop. I kept going back to the MacBooks and MacBook Pros because I’ve always been a Mac user. But several things kept getting in the way of me just going out and buying a new Mac:

  • The up-front cost: for one-third to one-half the price of a new MacBook Pro, I could get a tricked-out Dell laptop
  • Software conversion costs: upgrading my software (most notably, Photoshop and Illustrator)
  • Income, or lack thereof: I was slowly rebuilding my web development business after being sick for three months and not being able to keep up with the workload or generate new business

So at the beginning of December, I made a tough decision. Despite warnings from several folks (including my business partner, Mark, another die-hard Mac fan) that PCs are more vulnerable to viruses; despite the fact that I would have to find work-alikes for most of the software I used on the Mac; and despite my innate dislike for a certain Redmond-based software company, I made the Reverse Switch. I bought a new Dell Inspiron 1545 notebook PC with 4GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, dual-core, 64-bit architecture, blah blah blah.

As I took it out of the packaging and plugged it in, I felt both the thrill that one gets when purchasing a new computer, but also a nagging sense of guilt, as if I’d betrayed an old friend.

Next: I start looking for software, and find that, despite years of hearing claims of “there’s more software for the PC than the Mac,” I have a really hard time finding what I’m looking for…