Me and my kit: Part 1 - Computers
Part 1 of an intended 5 part series that explains my current IT set up.
As this is a new blog I thought I should do the usual "this is who I am, this is the kit that I use" post. Funnily enough this isn't my first attempt at blogging and it isn't the first such post that I have written. But those blogs are long gone and my kit has moved on anyway since then so it's a good time to write it again.
I've been using IT since the tender age of 10. I can still remember those early days of the UK home computer scene just getting in to swing: my first time seeing a Sinclair ZX-80, the most amazing machine I had ever seen in the ZX Spectrum, the local (and only) computer shop window filled with all colours and shapes of home computer... those were heady days where history was writing itself in front of our tender eyes. And I loved it.
Commodore 64... yep. Commodore 128... yep. Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC464... you name it we had it at one point or other.
From there I moved through various versions of the PC (running 486, Pentium, Pentium II, Celeron, Athlon) and Windows (3, 95, 98, ME, XP) until I ended up with Vista Business on a relatively underpowered Tablet PC. Running OneNote with a touch screen it was an amazing device to work with for note taking, sketch system plans, mind map projects. But I knew it wasn't what I wanted.
It's hard to pin point exactly what started this reaction in me. There wasn't really any one individual reason but I know a key issue was the continuing fight with drivers, blue screens of death and spinning egg timers.
In December 2007 I was out in Norwich doing a little sale shopping and managed to convince my wife to let me walk her around PC World. Unknown to me PC World had decided to dedicate some store space to a new Apple department. Browsing around here and talking to the on-site Apple expert was enough to convince me to try something new. With a quick nod from my wife I walked out with a 2.2Ghz MacBook with 1gb of ram.
The purchase was in no way planned and expected. It was a true "on a whim" decision and I truly thought the laptop would be no more than a simple play thing for a month or so before selling it on.
What I also didn't plan for was what happened next. I knew the hardware was going to be lovely and that the attention to detail compared to the Windows PC's I was coming from was likely to amaze. What I didn't expect was how quickly I would fall for the Apple "way" completely. Leopard, bundled with iLife, was a stunning set up that any new user could be productive on straight away. And the machine did not crash! Amazing!! It wouldn't be wrong to say that I fell in love with computing all over again after only a few days of use.
That MacBook continues to be the mainstay of my IT set up at home now. I've upgrade the ram to 4gb, installed a larger hard drive and made a fresh installation of Snow Leopard and it sits on my desk in pride of place.
I slowly moved my private computing over to the Mac over the next few months, keeping the Tablet PC for pure work purposes for note taking. The rest of my PC hardware was sold on, put in to storage ("just in case") or given to other family members.
Eventually the move to Mac needed to be complete including my mobile needs. The MacBook, having been a large investment for us at the time, rarely left my office and I needed something to go in my bag for when out and about. That's when I bought a MSI Wind netbook and the whole Hackintosh world started to take over!
To follow -
Part 2 - Hack-in-to-the-tosh!
Part 3 - The mobile me
Part 4 - Server, storage and infrastructure at home... the bits that make it all work
Part 5 - Software
