About 2 months ago, my beloved MacBook Pro suffered a GPU failure. It was about as sudden and unexpected as one can imagine. Being a person who does not like to work in the same coffee shop for more that 2 hours at a time, I became heavily dependent on my MacBook to be able to allow me to do all the work I needed to do, regardless of where I was. Luckily for me though, I had a base-level Mac Mini at home that I mainly used for recording music and what-not. Since I still needed a computer to do stuff in the mean time, my Mac Mini became my work computer of sorts while I figured out what to do with my MacBook.

The day my MacBook became unresponsive, I made an appointment at the Apple Store in Northridge for the very next day. So early Sunday morning I took it to Apple to get it diagnosed. I came back a few hours later and told me what exactly was wrong with it and how much it would cost to fix it. They gave me two options. One was pretty expensive and the other was waaaay more expensive. I chose the relatively less expensive option, which was to ship it out to their depot to get it fixed off-site for about $300. So I did that and they shipped it off and I was fine… for a while.

A few days later, they emailed me and told me that they found additional problems and that the original price they quoted me would no longer cover everything. So they claimed that there was water damage to the main Logic board and said it would cost $1250 to fix it.

I then sent them a nicely worded email, (which I typed with my middle fingers) and said that I would like to decline their services and would just like my MacBook returned to me.

So they did that. They shipped it back to the Apple store. I picked it up and went home and began weighing my options. At this point I had gone about 2 months without a MacBook. I had slowly been going insane from being trapped in my house being forced to work on my projects without the comforting sounds of baristas yelling out people’s names every few minutes. I began searching online for some cheap MacBooks on eBay. Every single one on I found was either super expensive or broken. And the good ones that were working always went up in price by $200 in the last few seconds of the auction.

I had finally had it. I was willing to get anything at this point. I even began considering a….. Windows PC! *cue woman screaming*

I really began thinking and all I needed a PC for was to run Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and potentially Terragen. So I looked online for which ones where moderately well rated and reviewed. Needless to say it was an extremely time-consuming process. I never knew so many different models of PCs could exist. It just seemed like overkill to me.

So I ended up finding a PC that piqued my interest enough to purchase it. It was an HP Pavilion 17-e040us (try saying THAT five times fast) and it had an Intel i3 processor, 6GB of RAM, and 750GB of storage. It seemed like it would’ve been able to handle some of my projects. So I ordered it on a late Wednesday and it arrived on Friday. I came home to it waiting for me in the living room. I opened it up and began setting it up because I had planned to test it out right away the next morning at Starbucks.

I got everything I needed installed without a hitch. I went off to Starbucks early on Saturday and got to work. It seemed to be able to handle whatever I threw at it. I thought this PC might really be the machine that would slowly pull me away from the grip of Steve Jobs.

But damn was I wrong. Like super wrong. It was almost embarrassing how wrong I was.

All day Saturday, it worked fine. I even took it out to Panera that evening and put in a good 4 hours of Photoshop work on it. I thought I was in the clear. So I went home, went to bed and woke up the next morning and sat on the living room couch with my PC and watched a documentary about Dinosaurs on Netflix. Things were working okay for a while. I was just browsing the web when suddenly some pop-ups came up on the screen and all hell broke loose.

Programs where trying to install themselves, my homepage on Firefox changed itself, the default search engine changed itself. I didn’t know what was going on at first.

Then I had a flashback to my dark days when I was young, dumb, and a Windows user.

I remembered that PC’s attract virus’ very easily. I had a Norton Antivirus trial thing installed and ran it. It came up with nothing. I thought that was strange so I tried doing a much deeper scan. That didn’t help either. I then began trying to manually find those files and started deleting them and did a Disk Cleanup. I deleted them and restarted. The PC suddenly decides to install about 100 or so updates as it’s restarting itself. I pretty much had to wait about an hour before I could use it again. I thought everything was good to go but as soon as I opened up Firefox again, the same things started happening. Links began opening on their own, homepage changed itself again, search engine changed again.

At this point, I had already given up. I was tired of all of this happening all at once. I just wanted to do some work but I couldn’t. I then snapped out of my Windows daze and came to my senses and requested to return the PC for a refund. I decided that the money I used to pay for this piece of crap could be put towards a brand new MacBook Pro. I restored the PC back to its factory settings and packaged it up and shipped it off yesterday afternoon via UPS.

So just to recap, this whole ordeal with a PC started on Friday, worked through Saturday, and of course, crashed hard in my face on Sunday. And yesterday I got rid of it and was immediately issued a refund from Amazon.

Okay, now whats the lesson of this story?

DON’T EVER BUY A WINDOWS PC!!

Especially if you have been using a Mac for the past few years. Never again will I make this same mistake. I’ve seriously learned my lesson and I hope any of you contemplating buying a PC, could just think about what you’re about to do and consider the consequences. Owning a PC is not worth throwing your whole life away. There are people who are willing to talk to you to get you through this.

Remember, once you go Mac, you never go back.