crossing over

Anyone who has spent a good deal of time with me understands that my position as a mac user is not the stock or standard position one generally finds a mac user in.  It is fairly typical (though is becoming less so every day) to find a mac user who could be described as follows:  die hard, fan boy, arrogant, confident, loyal, evangelical (not in the christian sense - in the mac sense).  I suppose at times I have taken on some of those traits – probably depending on how much time I have spent with the Apple rep in my store; however, I have always been in a unique position.  My grandfathers (on both sides of the family) were both employed by IBM in the height of the IBM PC days.  My father is a HUGE Gateway fan.  A note - neither of the above are negative comments.  My grandfathers were in a great company at pivotal time in history and my dad stands by his Gateways because he has been buying them since around 1995 and has only ever had one major hardware problem in all the machines he has purchased ... no matter how you slice it one major hardware issue in 13 years is not bad!!!  That said, it is not hard to picture how HUGE my choice to slide over to the dark side was.  Purchasing my 12" Powerbook four years ago was a huge leap.  The past 4 years have been smooth sailing with this computer and it still has a TON of life left in it.  The problem I have been running into is that it runs so slow while editing in photoshop or managing photos in Lightroom that I am pulling my hair out - again those of you who know me realize the futility in that statement.  Because of my background I have always told people that I use a mac because that is what I happen to use.  I love the system and it has definite advantages to the windows platform (hence the reason I purchased it in the first place); however, I sell windows systems to people all day long at Best Buy and can look them square in the eyes and tell them that they are getting a solid machine.  One of the first takeaways I got from Dave Ziser's Masters Class was that a computer is just another tool.  It is purchased to do a job and produce a product - so as long as it fits that utility purpose you can use whatever works for you.  David introduced us to an application he uses for ALL his wedding album designs called FotoFusion.  It is a windows only application.  Before the email's start, YES you can run it in Parallels or in Boot Camp on a Mac; however, as I mentioned above I have a PowerPC G4 Macintosh computer ... non intel ... non windows possible.  I started looking at possibilities to run this application (I will blog specifically on the application once I have run on my own machine and have built some sample content with it).

I have said all this to come to this point ... took way to long to do it but we are here now so lets press on.  I own a mac and love it; however, as a utility for my business it is slowing me down - 

not because it is a mac ... because it is old.  I found a sweet deal on an HP m9040n that went clearance and I am picking it up today or tomorrow.  I plan on setting it up as my production machine and stripping most production off my laptop so I can squeeze a few more years out of the unit before purchasing a Macbook or Macbook Pro.  All this means that I will be entering the land of Vista in the next 48 hours.  I'm so excited - not due to an operating system, not due to a brand of computer; instead, I am excited because I will have a fast production machine that will allow me to complete my edits faster and more accurately.  That is the bottom line.