Two weeks back I was helping my cousin restore his Windows system corrupted while upgrading from IE6 to IE7 on his Dell laptop. I was able to help him out with this as there are hundreds of people with the same problem on the internet.

Two hours later, my Dell laptop reminded me that it needs some work too….my mouse stopped working. I managed by connecting an external mouse, but then an hour later, my keyboard stopped working. So I reluctantly called Dell and was pleasantly surprised when someone answered my call in less than 10 minutes. This is a great improvement from Dell. The Dell rep asked me to do several tests for about an hour and while doing this, my hard drive crashed. When asked Dell about this, they said they’ll send me a replacement and they cant do anything about the data. WTF? I lost all my data while doing the tests they asked me to do and they cant do anything about it?

I asked BestBuy if they can do something about it. They said YES with $1679.00…thats to restore the data. Luckily, most of my data is online….but to restore some of the videos and other image data, spending almost $1700 was too much.

When Dell shipped the replacement, I spent almost 2 days installing the OS and the software only to realize the blue screen of death to appear again and that was the trigger point for me to get rid of Dell and Windows. Instead of spending $1700 to restore the data and wasting my time on this crap, I decided to go with a MacBook Pro.

With Apple, I didn’t have any problem opening any boxes…..I just spent couple of hours installing the apps I need and I am all set. I couldn’t think of anything else. For just in case scenarios, unlike Zoli, I bought Windows XP license and installed it on Parallels…and it is all working like a charm now. At this point, I am glad I moved out of windows and I wish I never have to go back to that deadly Dell/Windows combination. With an iMac, MacBook Pro, AppleTV, Airport Extreme and an iPhone, I guess I am too much tied into Apple now.

As I write this post, I am waiting for one of my video to render in iMovie 08 and it says that it has 45 minutes remaining to save my video in MOV format.

Today I bought iMovie ‘08 primarily to edit some new movies. I am really blown away by its simplicity and it is very very well done. Great job to whoever is involved in this project. It saved me lot of FinalCut Pro time. I was able to finish editing a seven minute movie in about 30 mins, but when I wanted to save the movie in .mov, it is taking forever on my iMac. While this is happening, my CPU usage is less than 25%.

While it is doing its job, I thought I’ll quickly post on this.