In 2008, I purchased a MacBook Pro laptop to help me with my photography editing to replace to old PC which I had since I was in university which was dated back to 2004. The Macbook Pro has served me well and it still does till today. So well that I am writing this blog post using this Mac.

Why am I writing this on my Mac when I have a nice spanking PC that I bought last year to replace my old one to play games such as Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 but up until 2 hours ago, it just died on me. It refuses to start up and boot up so I am really hoping that the hard disk is ok. Its so frustrating dealing with PC's, constantly have to figure out whats wrong with it, frequently crashes (mind you I am running on Windows 7 and I don't overclock the PC at all).

Anyhow I am just venting my frustrations online now because I can't play my usual dosage of Starcraft 2 and perhaps put in a couple of Warden/Butcher runs in Diablo 3 (I kinda suck at Diablo 3 and I am now stuck in Act 1 in Inferno). Hopefully when I bring my PC into C-Zone tomorrow at Digital Mall, I should be able to get it fixed fast enough so I can also head over to Sunway for a talk by ATP Motorsports.

While I am here sitting at home being frustrated, I just wonder, since the games I play are also available on the Mac, it would have been the wiser choice to just use a fully Mac environment at home. Host my Plex server on a Mac (which is a lot more stable than my PC) and combine all my gaming and photo editing on a single platform. I was thinking an iMac but personally, I feel that the iMac can't deliver the power I might want especially on a  nice and large 27" sized monitor. But hey, an iMac is pretty pricey and since I just bought my PC not too long ago, so I will have to make do with what I have left.

Ah, it reminds me of the days when I was overclocking my PC and letting the cool 5 degrees celcius air of Sheffield cool my PC down. Now it is just a real bother to take my PC out and try to figure out and trouble shoot the errors.

Maybe I am just getting too old for this shit and all I want is convenience.

To be completely honest, I have a desktop sitting at home which serves me more as a multimedia device. Its exactly almost 3 years old running on an old Core Duo processor at 2.13Ghz. Previously it has been running on Windows Vista Home Premium edition and I never had any issues with it because I hardly use the machine for any serious work. This is until Starcraft 2 came into mind and I installed the game and started playing it.

That was when all of the problems started to appear. The game was quite slow, at first I blamed it on my old PC specs and I haven't had the cash to upgrade it. Well, I just can't bring myself to spending so much cash on upgrading a perfectly working machine. Another problem I kept getting was that Vista kept crashing my Starcraft 2 and after trying to reinstall the game again, I just couldn't do it! I blamed it on the game at first, because in order to install the game, I had to be connected to the internet which somehow my Vista's protocol was preventing the game from detecting the internet.

Well after a long hard consideration, I went ahead and reformatted my PC, installed Windows 7 on it and am loving it. Starcraft 2 seems to be able to play much smoother now. To be honest, I actually installed XP on it first but the copy of XP I had was a little too old which didn't have any of my hardware drivers which meant I couldn't connect to the internet to download them. After a painful weekend of installing it, I am quite pleased with Windows 7. Its a pity that I only have the 32-bit version with me, otherwise I would have installed the 64-bit version and fully utilize the 4Gb of RAM I have installed.

At the moment I am still keeping this machine clean, only installed Google Chrome, Open Office, Alvira AntiVirus and VLC player. I guess those are the softwares I pretty much need at the moment.

Can't wait to get a new replacement office laptop fitted out with Win 7. My current one is still running on XP.



Not too bad for a 3 year old PC scoring a 5.4 on the Windows Experience Index.

Update:
Check out this commercial for the new Windows 7 phone.