I intended this post to be a somewhat thoughtful reflection on the past year, and possibly a statement of resolutions for the coming one. I also intended to post a photo album or two from the holidays. But this was last week - before The Fall. And what is it they say? Something about best-laid plans of mice and men? I'm surely one of those.

It started last Thursday when I came back from the gym to find my PC had gone to a black screen, upon which the words 'Non-system disk error' were written, innocently enough, at the top left. I tried rebooting. It took about 25 minutes. Excruciating. Gnashing of teeth. Biting of nails. Windows finally came back up, only to generate further cryptic errors like this one. Then it blue screened. I did some fancy windows ninja tricks - stopped unnecessary services from running, rebooted into safe mode, restored to a previous state. But no matter what I tried, the results were pretty much the same. Painfully slow processing followed by abrupt system failure.

Data loss was not a concern. Thanks to the backup routine I began last Spring, I had a fresh backup of all my files. Hardware and support costs? No worries there either. As luck would have it, I'm on the last month of a three-year extended warranty from HP. The timing really couldn't be better, in that sense.

But lost time and productivity? This may be a problem. I've already spent a few hours on the phone with HP trying various troubleshooting methods, all of which I was fairly certain would not work even as they were being offered to me. I think what this comes down to is a hard drive failure. I'm not sure what gave it away. Probably the scratching and grinding noises which began the morning of that first breakdown. Today, I can't even boot into windows anymore, but while I still could, the error logs read 'disk error' and 'atapi error,' both of which seemed to point to a disk problem. And when I tried to run a disk check outside of windows, it told me the drive 'did not support it,' which doesn't even make sense. But I guess all those clues are code for 'You need to try to re-install windows,' which is what the HP support staff recommends I do. They're sending me updated system disks in the mail. My guess is shortly after I try those, HP will be sending me a new hard drive. But I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm willing to go through the troubleshooting process. In the meantime, however, I've got two active Web projects and a couple of other pending ones and no computer with the right software on it to do the work. That's got me a little on edge. Just a little.

Now, I'll probably get the windows laptop back up and running eventually, but I decided that, despite this, I needed to heed the signs being hailed at me by the quarterbacks of computing: It's time for a change. Damn all the uncertainty. Damn the new software I'll have to buy. It's time to take the plunge. It's time to switch to a Mac.

So last Saturday night, on the brink of a new year and all the promise and anticipation a time like this holds, I ordered a MacBook Pro. And come Thursday, I'll be a part of the family. I'll be able to play with the cool kids. And thanks to Parallels, I'll still be able to drink the Redmond kool-aid from time to time, if I really really really need to, which I might just have to do so I can use my favorite photo application, at least until Google wises up and makes a Mac version.

As some of you know, I've been wanting to go Mac for a while, and had always prepared to do it right around this time, anyway. We bought an iBook last February, which C uses, and I've been envious of her OS X tricks ever since. But as the time approached, I began to get cold feet and I wound up ordering this. Then, despite my best attempts to sabotage the effort, I managed to send it back because it really wasn't what I wanted. Now I'm following through with the original plan - get a Mac - and it feels good. But there's still a lot of work to do: Configurations to implement. Files to convert. Lots of exporting and importing. New software to order and install. New shortcuts and work-flows to learn. When your entire life is in digital, switching platforms is no easy task. There'll be a period of dust and noise around here, which I hope you will excuse. But when it's all over, I should come out on the other side renewed, reborn. And at the start of a new year, what more can you ask for?

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