To those of you who've been reading me for years because of my Windows expertise and insights, I'm not letting go of Windows! I will be echoing my experience on my current Windows production machine -- a dual-core ThinkPad T60 -- by upgrading to Windows Vista. I have access to four Macs, three of which are Intel-based. There are more than 15 Windows machines that I use and test with. It's a Windows world, and I'm not dropping out.

But I'm committed to giving the Mac a fair chance.

The first two weeks

I had initially planned to change over to the Mac a couple of weeks ago, but problems with the 15-in. MacBook Pro that I received from my company caused a severe delay. The machine, a 2-GHz Intel dual-core, is only six months old but had just returned from Apple repair because of issues with spontaneous restarts that were occurring two or three times a day. It's a problem that has plagued a small percentage of Apple's Intel line of MacBooks. It's not a universal experience, however. I own another MacBook Pro 15 that has suffered no spontaneous restarts.

During the first 24 hours with the machine, I came to the conclusion that the most likely culprit was a 1GB RAM SIMM that was added at the time of purchase. I pulled the SIMM on the second day. Wanting to do the legwork myself, I contacted the makers of the SIMM, a company called Edge, and initiated a trouble ticket. Two days later, running on the original 1GB of Apple RAM only, the MBP 15 was free of unwanted restarts. Edge confirmed that we had purchased the correct SIMM module for this machine and that the SIMM must be faulty. It promptly issued an RMA and offered a free replacement.