Why do computers have the longevity of a hamster? My Sony VAIO was two years old this week, and just died.  It had been limping along for months. Slowing down, running out of memory, crashing. I switched to Macs in the office meanwhile, which are lovely and reliable and not virus-crashy. Today I picked up the reanimated corpse of my laptop from a marvellous local PC repair shop, which has just become my I.T. department. Along with a hefty bill. New hard drive, Norton removed, AVG installed. Data, thankfully, saved.
Why do computers have the longevity of a hamster? My Sony VAIO was two years old this week, and just died.  It had been limping along for months. Slowing down, running out of memory, crashing. I switched to Macs in the office meanwhile, which are lovely and reliable and not virus-crashy. Today I picked up the reanimated corpse of my laptop from a marvellous local PC repair shop, which has just become my I.T. department. Along with a hefty bill. New hard drive, Norton removed, AVG installed. Data, thankfully, saved.

I now have to spend days – and possibly more cash – reinstalling loads of software. Annoyingly, I’ve lost my product key for Microsoft Office 2003 – so am relying on an ancient copy of Office XP Small Business for now. Both are probably more reliable than the 2007 version, which I hear horror stories about. I am now only really using the laptop when I’m out and about – and for specific PC software that I don’t have on my iMac. So I’ll make do so far as I can rather than invest a fortune in new applications that I don’t like. This is the Age of Prudence after all.

I’ve totally gone over to the Mac side. I haven’t even got Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc – yet. I prefer to use the pre-installed Mac software instead: Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote. All of which are better and convert into PC formats. Takes a little adjusting to, but I’m getting flashbacks to the last time I used Macs, at college, 20 years ago. They’ve changed a bit since then. But there are similarities too.

I need PowerPoint on the laptop, since I use it for lectures and workshops. But even there I might consider trying something else entirely, since I can usually run presentations directly from my laptop rather than rely on a university machine and a memory stick. Any recommendations for a more creative presentation package?

Then there’s the open source option. Is anyone using Open Office? Any good? I’ve reached that stage where I resent paying a single penny to Microsoft for its buggy, broken, virus-prone, over-priced software. Join me. There is always an alternative. Explorer’s market share has quickly been eroded by Firefox –  a browser that actually works. The next target must surely be office applications.