7th Dec
2007

Several months of on-going disaster must have at least some detrimental effect on a person... take a good friend of mine, names witheld, so let us call him Matt. First up, a few months ago Matt experienced hardware problems with the server(s) he maintains. The knock-on effect of this was moving several sites from one server to another, whilst simultaneously setting up the server environment on the new machine, on a new OS (well, a new flavour of Linux).

Then, his own hardware at home starts packing up. First to go is the hard drives. They crash and stick - each time losing Matt's work and forcing him to re-format and re-install. Whilst he's considering replacing it, his super-fancy graphics card (barely six months old) starts spewing out drunken polygons in the middle of Call of Duty 4...

Possibly, or not, a result of the graphics card issues, Matt's monitor then burns itself out in a glorious fit of white glare and acrid smoke. Pulling his ten-year old CRT monitor out of the attic only resulted in less desk space and more eye- and headaches due to flickering refreshes... how did we cope?

So, Matt decides its time to get shut of the lot and replace it with a swanked up Inspiron laptop from Dell. Containing a lovely GeForce 8600M GT graphics card and plenty of other extra goodies, this reasonably priced 'top would easily replace Matt's burnt out desktop, even for games.

Things start looking up, only to see the piano falling... Dell, or God, or some evil combination of the two, today delivers to Matt a basic unit Insipron worth approximately £400. Matt also now has two invoices for the original cost of about £700. After what I imagine to be a very short, angry conversation with someone at Dell Support (India Depot), Matt gets a refund. Or two. They also arrange to collect the laptop the very next day. Nice of them to do so, shame they couldn't deliver it in that amount of time.

So, the saga continueth... and the upshot of all this? Matt has decided to buy a MacBook. An Apple, for crying out loud.

Has my good friend cracked? People that turn to Macs, by his own admission, "are like people turn to Jesus, as a last resort". I wonder if he's right. I'd have had enough of Linux, Windows and PCs in general if I'd had to cope with all the above crap.

Having said that, he's also just told me: "I'm turning to Jesus with my fists raised, though. Not for forgiveness. This time, it's personal." So he's not going down without a fight.

Or a fucking Apple Mac.