My 43rd Birthday, and another mid-life change!
Back in the late 80’s, I was noodling around on an old pizza box Mac LCIII, and when money permitted in the 90’s I “upgraded” to a Macintosh Performa 6400. A horrific computer, crashed continuously, even after reading just about every “Mac Secrets” book that David Pogue had written. That was running system 7.6. When system 8.0 came out I leapt at the upgrade only to find more of the same. When it was good it was very nice to use, but when it was bad it was horrible! System restart after system restart, until I developed an almost pathological hatred of the “bong” noise as the Mac rebooted. I stuck loyally to it though, until I could take no more.
I retired the beast, bought a Texas Instruments Pentium 2 laptop running Win 95, and later Windows 98, and vowed never to touch an Apple again.
Until this month.
When the Mac Mini was released even I was hugely impressed with the simplicity and minimalist design. I am a fan of simple minimalism in most things, and a desktop computer that sat sleekly in a white and aluminium box, with just the slot loader and a bright white LED on the front just about tempted me to get one. But the specs were poor, and I already had 2 decent running laptops, so the Mini, and the necessary purchase of a monitor made no sense and I forgot about it.
But recently I have been getting fed up with my Acer laptop - first generation Core Duo - which has the shittiest keyboard ever made. It ran fast, due to fastidious stripping out of bloatware and services, but was heavy, very plasticky and after trying Vista on it I was so disgusted that I decided to sell it. I got an excellent price from a friend who really wanted it, and at the same time found out that the mac Mini had been quietly upgraded to a Core2Duo processor, running at 2.0GHz for the more expensive model. By this time I already had a decent viewsonic 19″ widescreen monitor and so I decided to make the change. My wife uses a Compaq laptop, which has a superb keyboard and great build quality , so we still have both systems running- and of course with Boot Camp I can put XP on the Mac as well. Or Vista if I choose to, LOL! Yeah, right…. ;p
Well, today is my birthday, so my wife presented me with a copy of Mac OSX Leopard which has just been released.
And I absolutely love it! It runs so fast and is so slick on the Mini. True 64bit OS, with new optimization of the graphics that mean even the GMA950 integrated graphics of the Mini can show super smooth video playback, even when hooked up to my 32″ LCD HDTV. Beautiful! And I also use it mainly for photo editing, and iPhoto is a nice, simple and fast program. In fact as the advertising says, “everything just works!” And it’s true! 
DVD creation, movie editing, photo organization and editing all built into the iLife08 package. And the new Coverflow file preview system is just magic, such a time saver. And the computer is silent - totally. Zero noise from the fan or hard drive. Blissful for late night working/surfing.
Bought one of those new sleek aluminium keyboards as well - such a pleasure to use.
So here’s the new desktop, fast, slick, beautiful to use, and I am an Apple fan once more! 
Click on it for a better view.
