Ode to the Macintosh...

I got my first macintosh in 1989 or 1990 and it was love at first sight..MIT, where I was a PhD student was at the time a macintosh and supercomputer only environment and I manage to convince my father I needed it for 'work' when truthfully I also needed it for music.....To this day, although I am pretty fluent in the various Windows OS's it is only the macintosh platform I have ever loved.....I tell people I am a mac diehard who sometimes has to use a windows computer...... I personally have believed that the OS from Cupertino is and always has been vastly superior to that from Redmond...And I wanted to give two experiences over the past few months that to me removed any possible doubt..

I recently upgrade my Studio's computer from XP to Windows 7..I had to reinstall everythign and reconfigure them to how I like them to work.. I did use the inappropriately named Easy Transfer from Microsoft... What a piece of crap.... someone from Redmond needs to see how apple's Migration Assistant works......you tell it where your old account is. connect a cable and it transfers everything..... applications, files, settings etc..... The move on the PC took me about two weeks to complete everything... if it was a mac that would have taken maybe five hours maximum.... Now if I do change my motherboard on my Windows computer I have to do the process all over again, even though I am not changing the OS on it......WTF!!!!!!!

Yesterday my main imac that I use for my internet, emailing, downloading, invoicing etc died...
I have learnt the hard way the importance of backup, so I am an avid user of Time Machine from Apple, which basically seemlessly takes snapshots of your computer every hour or so, so you can go back to any state the computer was in a few hours, days, weeks ago.....
I felt handicap today since I couldn't create invoices, print scripts etc, answer email as I usually do without my imac.
But I have a macbookpro which is my portable studio....It has only music software on it, and I like it that way....
Three features only avaiable on the macintosh allowed me in the space of one hour to get back my imac account to run on my macbook pro exactly as it did on the imac without touching the macbook pro music only hard drive.

1) Do the PC users know on the mac you can boot and work entirely off of an external hard drive? That is a huge deal. I can take my hard drive with me, to a different country, attach it to someone else's computer, boot from my hard drive and work exactly with all my applications, files etc as if I was home on my own macintosh...There is nothing like this on the PC world.....that I am aware of.. nothing......for this feature alone, I believe macintosh are superior to PC's.

2) TimeMachine...... After I booted my macbook pro from a backup I have of it on an external hard drive, I could then use Migration Assistant (which would be item 3), and tell Migration Assistant to use my timemachine backup of the imac, to create a new account on this external hard drive of my account on my Imac.... It did that in less than an hour...

So here am I, working on my macbook pro, from an external hard drive with all my settings, files, applications from my imac and working as I would have two days ago...

And when I want to work on my macbook pro as music only I just tell it to boot from its internal hard drive........and the macbook will be as it was....
Try any of that on a PC....

I swear my next studio computer, I will be back to fully macintosh.....it is just too superior an OS imho...

rsp