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OneWord: Why

Why does anyone use Windows? That’s what I’ve been wondering since I got my Macs. I recently visited my dad and his computers, and heard him tell me how the computer repair shop had completely rebuilt his computer, trying to figure out why it was constantly slow and crashing frequently. They formatted the hard drive, causing him to lose a lot of data. Then they installed some anti-virus software on the computer that made it too slow to use. After a couple of weeks of downtime and lost productivity, they finally got it running decently enough to use, and it’s actually quite speedy at the moment.

Then this weekend when I was visiting the in-laws, I logged on to their brand new Sony desktop, only to be greeted with approximately 50 Windows Messenger spams that you have to click “OK” on to get rid of. Luckily I knew how to disable Messenger to stop that from happening, so I did.

Then we visited another friend’s house, where we found that his dad’s computer was constantly kicking the entire network offline somehow every time Internet Explorer was opened on it. It also had about 45 processes running in the background constantly, even though there were no programs or even system tray icons going. Most of them seemed to be spyware… After running about 3 different anti-spyware/adware programs, they were still there. When I was using the computer for about 2 minutes to try to see what I could do, a window came up saying something about a virus, then the whole screen went blue. It wasn’t the blue screen of death though, just a solid blue screen. My friend ran a few different anti-virus programs, only to have one of them destroy some files that Windows needed to operate, so he spent the rest of his weekend reinstalling Windows.

Meanwhile I’m happily laying on my bed typing away with my Mac on my lap, without wires, without anti-virus software, without any worries of someone spying on me or attacking my computer just because I looked at a web page. Sure Macs are still vulnerable to attack, but there are still no viruses at all for OSX, and only a few known security flaws, all of which Apple has already patched before anyone can take advantage of them. It’s so nice to just be able to use your computer, not maintain it.

This is one of those questions that just can’t be answered.