Alex Livingston

Another Open Letter

Written by

gala5931

in

Dear Windows –

It’s about Vista. If I had wanted a Mac, I would have shelled out the dough to add one to my list of fashionable accessories*. As it turns out, I want a PC. You’ll note the use of the present tense “want”.

I was an Apple guy once, back when you needed to know what to put after a C prompt to make an IBM-clone do anything other than blink at you mockingly. I used to say ‘an Apple is a tool, and a PC is a hobby’. Used my tried and true Macintosh SE through college without issue. Then I grew up and got a job.

So, you hooked me. I left the world of smiling icons to enter one of deadly blue screens, happy to spend hours of my life watching Scandisk try to undo whatever horrible thing I had done to my PC (simply by trying to use it). My lifelong obsession with videogames reached new heights, and I came to love the accessibility of every aspect of a PC’s function offered by Windows 98 as I tweaked and tweaked, desperate to improve framerate.

Having become a willing devotee of Uncle Bill, I came to detest the Macolytes. Why pay so much for a pretty case wrapped around a machine that wouldn’t let you mess with it? They were useless from a business standpoint and had precisely crapola for games. Yet friends and family, people I care about, fell to the lure of the quick and easy path of Mac ownership.

And now, having carried the torch for these many years, I am slapped in the face with this new Mac-like OS. Why don’t you just replace the Start menu with the Finder and move the X to the other side of the window while you’re at it?

With unflagging love,

Alex


* This list is very, very short.

Comments

3 responses to “Another Open Letter”

  1. alanna Avatar
    alanna

    i hate hate hate vista. wait until you star realizing all of the annoying things it does on its own. we’ll talk later.

    Reply
  2. Peter Avatar
    Peter

    Dear Windows,

    I am so sorry that I bought a Mac. I want you to know that everything I said about you, I still believe. Namely, that Macs are a waste of money for all but a very specific audience, Macs are more difficult to use (even though their ease-of-use is greatly gabbed about), Macs are inferior for general business purposes, and so on and so forth.

    I purchased a Mac for a very specific reason, and it has paid off, literally. It has allowed me to perform certain media functions that I otherwise would have to hire others to perform — not because they couldn’t be done with a PC, but because unlike 99.99999% of other activities, these functions happened to be Mac-prevalent with my vendors and suppliers.

    The Mac is working out fine for me (and the iPhone is truly great), but if you want me to sit down and list the reasons someone else shouldn’t get one, I’d be happy to.

    Sincerely,

    Peter

    PS I still run Windows via a virtualization solution, because the Mac can’t handle everything I need it to do. That makes you like an ex with benefits.

    Reply
  3. Beers Avatar
    Beers

    Awww… Alex, you made Vista cry. Give it a chance. I’ve been running Vista for a year and have found it to be quite nice. Just turn off the UI stuff that annoys you. You can make Vista look as much like XP as your crazy little heart desires. It’s not the best OS, but I think it’s pretty neat.

    Reply

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