… and now I’m a believer
 


 

It may have started a lot earlier, but the immediately preceding events, which led up to the present condition, started with ↵that keyboard. My enthusiasm never broke, and then TK reminded me, that, as university staff, I get a heavy discount at Apple. The dam broke in the middle of the night between Sunday and Monday last week—I ordered a MacBook online. On Tuesday it was here. After having carried it home I switched it on and everything worked like a charm. Except that I could not connect the machine to my wireless network. There was no problem hooking the MacBook up with the modem via Ethernet cable, but it refused to connect wirelessly, although all my three other currently running machines did so. Moreover, just a week earlier a visitor had connected her MacBook without problems. Research on the Web unearthed the problem: MacBooks with Core 2 Duo Intel CPUs can not work together with the wireless router my ISP provided me with. The ISP naturally does not manufacture hardware itself, but buys devices and rebrands them. The ISP’s website is all marketing mumbo-jumbo and gives you no clue about the router itself. The router’s software does, though, and the Web’s vast valleys did the rest, as I learned from there that the Taiwanese manufacturer will not release firmware for my router any more. That was enough for me, on Saturday I went downtown and bought an Airport Extreme base station. It was a matter of minutes to set it up—despite of ↵the mess I have to maintain. Every machine I own, from the oldest notebook up to the new MacBook, flawlessly connects, everything is way faster and the signal is absolutely stable. I have taken a bite of the Apple, have converted and am a sincere believer now.