Even though I've never owned a PC, my friends like to joke that I know more about PCs (because of my knowledge of Macs) than your average person. I doubt that..... I prefer to play dumb when it comes to PCs. Too much demand for tech support out there.....

So when it came time to buy a PC, I was just like your ordinary buyer, flipping through the Sunday ads seeing what is a good buy this week. In truth, I was shopping for my Mom, not myself. As it turns out, it didn't make sense for her to by a Mac, so I steered her to a PC laptop and I was her personal shopper. (Reason: She's in her 70's and uses a PC at work. I didn't want to teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak.)....

We decided to get a large screen laptop from a reputable manufacturer. Knowing that my mom's use will be typical (Office, browsing, email) and won't stress any modern PC, I suggest we shop on price first.....

So we walk into Best Buy with the Sunday ad in hand and find that special, the Toshiba Satellite Pro 355D with 17” Diagonal TruBrite Widescreen Display on sale for $550, normally $700. Sounds good. I also know to never pay list price at Best Buy too.

Unfortunately.... This Toshiba feels like the McDonalds Happy Meal version of a laptop. All rounded and puffy, you can feel the thin plastic flex between your fingers when you pinch it. The keys sound like Legos. For $550, you can only expect so much, so I don't let on to my disappointment....

Summary observations:

• Only with a PC could you get a 17" laptop for $550.
• I need a way of comparing the value of PCs.
• Cheap PCs are cheap.
• Damn, PCs are ugly.
• The list price is not the final price. We paid more than the cost of the computer for extras.

Bottom line: $1148 + tax, so that's about $1237 here in California.

With this year's iPhone and iPod updates behind them, Apple watchers have shifted their attention to the products that matter most to the company's bottom line: the MacBook and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth MacBook Pro.

.... Macs represent more than 48% of Apple's quarterly revenue these days and MacBooks account for 62% of that.

Sales of Apple's laptops have been on fire lately (no overheating pun intended). On Wednesday, NPD reported that Apple's (AAPL) share of the North American notebook market grew from 6.6% to 10.6% over the past year — a 60% increase that easily outpaced market leaders Dell , HP and Acer.......

Which makes it all the more surprising that Apple has waited so long to spruce up its notebook line - the laptop-scorching MacBook Pro, in particular. As Seth Weintraub points out at Computerworld.com, the look and feel of the MacBook Pro is essentially unchanged from the titanium Powerbook that Steve Jobs introduced at Macworld 2003 — a couple of lifetimes ago in computer terms.

.......that's all supposed to change on Oct. 14, when the long-awaited revamped notebooks are due to be introduced....What will they look like?

To jump start the conversation, Weintraub on Wednesday posted his wish-list of features,.....

A Google software engineer said that it's a safe bet that Chrome will hit the Mac platform before Linux. Google launched Chrome, its entry to the browser war, earlier this month only on Windows.

When asked if Chrome will hit new platforms soon, Ojan Vafai, a Google software engineer who is working on the browser, said a "large percentage" of developers are working on the Mac and Linux rollouts. "We really don't know when [Chrome will launch for Mac and Linux] we've been working on it for a few months now. I would guessand this is a total guessthat the Mac one would be first. It's just a market share issue."

Jerry Seinfeld is out. The new star is Sean Siller, a Microsoft employee who looks surprisingly like John Hodgman, the "I'm a PC" guy from Apple's successful ad campaign.

The resemblance is no coincidence.

"I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype," says Mr. Siller....

The new ad ends the short-lived Jerry Seinfeld series. General consensus called those two TV spots somewhat random and rambling....

What would TV comedy have been if NBC had canceled "Seinfeld" after just three episodes? Microsoft has done just that - or so I say.

Now we'll never know what really happens in the misadventures of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
Will they find a new family to live with? Will the family have a shower for Bill's conquistadors?....

Microsoft spin doctoring has this story: The campaign wasn't canceled. There were always going to be only three Bill and Jerry commercials. Yeah? It's tough for me to accept that a company as fiscally conservative as Microsoft would pay Jerry Seinfeld $10 million for three TV spots. Microsoft's position is that the three commercials were teaser ads. The real campaign starts today.....

The first criticism will be about Microsoft once again copying Apple, but badly as usual........

Microsoft has bid goodbye to Jerry Seinfeld and the next stage of its $300m global advertising campaign will launch in the US tonight with a TV ad that confronts rival Apple's disparaging "Mac vs PC" ads.

The TV campaign, which uses the line "Windows. Life without walls", is expected to feature Bill Gates in a cameo role.

Microsoft's first two ads, which featured Gates and Seinfeld, polarised public and industry opinion.....

According to one source, the main thrust of the new campaign is to champion "real people" who use Microsoft products.

This week's attack on Sarah Palin's e-mail account highlights how the same application could have very different threat models depending on the technology used. While this is a general issue for all Software-as-a-Service offerings versus traditional desktop packages, let's focus on just e-mail for now. Let's first step into our adversary's shoes and try to think like an attacker.

If your target is a webmail system, there are a variety of techniques you can use to compromise the account.....

It appears that desktop-based applications are more secure from face value, but our model discounts data loss from hard drive failures, bad backups, and all of the other means that isolated pieces of hardware can refuse to work.....

Partly due to the success of the iPod, an increasing number of computer users are switching to an Apple Macintosh, more simply called a Mac. While previously only experienced (creative) professionals had an 'Apple', almost one in ten computer users are now choosing a Mac. Despite this, there is still only a limited choice of peripheral devices specifically for a Mac. Trust now puts an end to this with the introduction of an advanced range of products for the Mac.

The products in this new Trust Made for Mac range have been designed to be in keeping with the design, functionality and user-friendliness of the Mac. The colour, shape and appearance of all the products match that of the Mac and MacBook. For example, the keyboards have the characteristic 'Option' and 'Command' function keys that Mac users are familiar with...

The stylish products include speakers, headsets, tablets, USB hubs and card readers....

Apple has been named in a lawsuit against former American Idol and rock singer Chris Daughtry.

Daughtry is being sued by Randy Mazick because the song "Feels Like Tonight" on the album "Daughtry" is a copy of his own song called "Tonight." alleges Mazick.....

The lawsuit names Apple as one of the defendants because Apple distributed the song on its iTunes Store.....

After all the changes at my school, we have been reusing some "older computers" to fit different needs. There are some pieces of technology that we are abandoning: no more mechanical mice (students like to take out the little roller balls) and no more single-button mice. We have also disposed of any Mac that doesn't have FireWire. With FireWire, PowerPC Macs can use FireWire Target Disc Mode and use an external drive to boot the computer.

That is our current line in the sand. However, we did have some G4 towers left over from a keyboarding class.

Most of these venerable warriors,"Sawtooth" Power Macs from 1999, had been running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and had little over 256 MB in RAM plus 10 GB hard drives. The science classroom we were sending them to needed a little bit more modern operating system and larger hard drives....

Shipments of VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop, the two virtualization software packages that allow Mac owners to run Windows applications, are up 50% so far this year, according to market tracker NPD Group Inc.

The market for the software has exceeded growth in global sales of Mac hardware, which was up 41% year over year in its most recent quarter, according to Apple Inc.

Business users needing to run Windows-only apps such as Microsoft Corp.'s Access or Project, or the latest Office suite, are driving demand, said Michael Redmond, a software analyst at NPD. Gamers who can't find the latest offerings, such as Crysis Warhead or Warhammer Online, for the Mac yet were also pushing up sales.

If Steve Jobs doesn't want to push Apple into the enterprise computing arena, maybe VMware can do the honors.

The just-released VMware Fusion 2.0 brings a slew of business-friendly new features to this user-friendly tool for running Microsoft Windows software on Mac hardware.....

Because Fusion is targeted to a specific host platform -- Mac OS X -- and its very specific set of Intel hardware, it's a lean and mean virtual machine with great performance and an ever-slicker user experience. VMware Workstation and Server are built to work on a range of different hardware/software platforms, so it's harder to make them as efficient or as easy-to-use as Fusion is.....

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