A tale of two computers
I spent part of last night installing a new
printer on our home network. Our old laser printer had reached the end of its
planned life, since the drum needed replacement. The cost of a drum exceeds, or
nearly exceeds, the cost of a new printer, so I took the opportunity of buying a
network ready printer. By the way, if you are considering buying a color laser
printer, make sure you ask about the price of toner replacements. Suffice it so
say I stuck with black and white.
I
installed it first on my Mac. Of course it installed with no problems. At no
time was there more than one choice to be made (meaning of course, that I never
had to make any choices) and the only inconvenience was the fact that I had to
re-boot after installing drivers. I then proceeded, with much trepidation, to my
wife's Dell, where for several confusing minutes I was stuck because I had made
the wrong choice between a networked printer and a shared network printer. While
in retrospect the distinction between the two should have been obvious, at the
time I deluded myself into thinking that, since my wife and I would be sharing
the printer, it was going to be a shared network printer, but such was not the
case. I finally concluded that the other option was correct, and the printer
connected. You see, Windows assumes that you actually have an administrator for
your network; Mac assumes that you have one as well, but it assumes that the
administrator is you, and that you're an idiot, at least when it comes to
computers.
While doing this I noticed
that my wife's Dell has now entered that period of senility so typical of
Windows based computers. Every Windows computer I ever had (and I blush to say
how many I have had), has sooner or later begun to slow to a crawl. It is not a
result of enhanced software making demands on the processor; my wife does not
run a lot of processor intensive software. I think its because every time you
install software on a Windows machine, files are sprayed everywhere in your
system folder, and are loaded and run in the background whether you need them or
not. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon of the glacially slow Windows computer
is real. The only cure I've heard of is a complete
re-install.
Meanwhile my almost three
year old Mac soldiers on quite well. Aperture runs sort of slowly, but that's to
be expected given the heavy demands it makes on the processor, which is a
relatively slow G4. Everything else runs fine. The comparison with my wife's
Dell is slightly unfair because my Mac has more RAM, but even with the standard
configuration I'm confident that it would not operate as slowly as
hers.
I've been working on her,
steadily wearing down her resistance. Give me another year and there'll be
another Mac in the family.
Posted: Saturday - January 20, 2007 at 09:23 AM