Sunday, August 12, 2012

In Diversity There is Strength

2008 frozen MacBook
Not worth fixing?
Your humble servant settled the Windows vs. Mac controversy years ago. The solution: get both, unless you're a starving student. For personal uses, such as entertainment or editing videos, the Mac is much easier to work with. Also, transferring data such as calendars and contacts between Macs, iPads and iPhones is quickly effected.

For business use, I still am wedded to the Windows version of Microsoft Office, as are most of my clients. Yes, Office files can be moved between platforms, but I'm about 20 percent faster on the PC version and do work on the PC more than on the Mac.

It's always handy to have an extra computer in case one of them breaks down. Over the weekend the four-year-old MacBook froze when starting up and still won't get unstuck. (This post has been written on a five-year-old Dell desktop.) It's an inconvenience that the MacBook is down, but the Dell keeps me in business so there's no need to rush the fix / replace decision.

In diversity there is strength.

Related: AT&T persists in hawking its U-verse package. AT&T already has our landline, mobile, and DSL internet account. Now it wants our television, too.

However, switching from our satellite TV account to AT&T would be risky. AT&T's Internet was down for 12 hours from Friday night to Saturday morning; if we had switched to U-verse our TV could have been down, too. The vulnerability to a single provider is not worth the few dollars saved. © 2012 Stephen Yuen

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