End of an Era

Today I said goodbye to an old friend: my Windows computer that has been with me for more than five years. In fact, I am now totally Apple.

It was surprisingly difficult. A friend gave me $70 for the thing, and a few weeks ago I would have considered that sort of overpriced. But last night, I reformatted the hard drive, and discovered that a lot of the ills of the machine were simply the accumulation of trash. It's still true that the machine can't run Word for Windows in any modern version and that Norton doesn't make an anti-virus for it any more. But if the thing had been running this well in April, I don't think i would have bought the iMac. Lots of nostalgia there—I spent hundreds of hours doing desktop publishing on it (a main money-maker for quite some time). Lots of AIM time with several friends (a couple of them deeply depressed guys I tried to encourage). I'll actually miss the Windows chime when I turn the machine off.

I always second-guess any major financial event, so I guess this isn't much different. The new machine does look pretty good, though, and has almost no spaghetti cables under the desk. I'll get used to pretty, efficient, and elegant. Just give me time.