Ten Reasons Why

The Dell has been getting cantankerous for almost a year now. The original 40GB hard drive on the Inspiron gave up the ghost last fall. (Thankfully less than a week after I'd bought an external hard drive for back-up purposes -- how's that for serendipity?) Simple enough to replace it with a new 80GB hard drive. Well, simple except that the old HD must have been pneumatically screwed into the HD tray frame. I had to buy a new tray off eBay to put the new drive in, since I mangled the old frame trying to get the old drive out.

That delayed my HD upgrade by about a week while I waited for the new HD to arrive, so during that week I booted the Inspiron off a bootable Ubuntu Linux CD and saved any work to a USB key or the external HD. Craziness, but it worked just fine. Apparently, you don't need an internal HD with an OS on it to run your computer. Its more just a convenience than anything else. :-)

Then, in the winter, one of the two fans built into the Inspiron started to fail with ear-endangering grinding noises. I considered replacing the fans, but apparently the way the Inspiron is laid out, you have to remove the entire motherboard to replace the fans. Ugh. Too much geekery even for me. Instead, in an attempt to keep the CPU cool I found a little free app for manual control of the Inspiron's fan. That let me disable the grinding fan, and control when the remaining good one kicked in and at what speed – enough control to keep the CPU adequately cooled. I also invested about $35 in a cooling pad (which also conveniently doubled as a USB hub) to assist in the anti-heat campaign, but which unfortunately added about three-quarters of an inch to the height of the already-thick Inspiron. But I'm frugal (comes from being a teacher for years before I got into the software biz), so I made do.

This cobbled together solution kept me going for another six months, but last week the second, remaining fan started making the same grinding noises. I'd already been toying with getting a new computer, even as far as proclaiming to a co-worker a week earlier that I was going to buy one of the new Intel-based MacBook Pros over the weekend. I even went to the Apple Store that weekend, but couldn't really justify purchasing a new computer because "the Dell was still holding its own." (That frugality again.)

But, man, when that second fan started moaning like a horror movie monster, my ass was in the car on the way to the Apple Store in minutes. Oh, I could probably have figured out some way to keep the Dell going for another couple of months, but frankly there comes a point when enough's enough. I'm not broke, I make a decent living -- I can afford a new computer. So rather than deal with the headache of keeping the Dell on life support, I am now the owner of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro (the 15" 2.166 Ghz model).

Up next: Why Mac?