Questions about the Mac

A good friend found out a couple weeks ago that I'm a Mac guy. He was surprised and very impressed. Today I found out why. He asked Jill if he could interrupt us between the services at church to ask me some Mac questions. Turns out that he is fed up with Microsoft. Since he's the IT guy for a small company, he knows a thing or two about computers, something I had just learned recently. He is sick of paying too much money for software when there are free versions out there with almost as much functionality. He's planning to get a Mac and run OpenOffice in place of MS Office. His goal is to make it completely Microsoft free. I'm not a big fan of MS (if that wasn't already obvious), but I'm not so opposed to MS as to keep my computer completely MS free. Every now and then I even use the MS Office that I have on my Macs at home (but its very rare). I use MS Office on my Mac at work a lot. I never fire up Internet Exploder though. That's just a waste of software. I won't use it even on the Windows machines at work. Its just too dangerous to use it on the internet, and there really isn't much other use for it.

During the course of our conversation, we started talking about OEM software. I'm not sure what OEM stands for, but its software that comes with your computer (such as Windows or Office) and it is only licensed for use on the computer that it comes with. That's right. You actually think that you buy software when you buy a new computer, but you don't. You are only allowed to use it on that computer, and if you upgrade, too bad. My friend had some VERY strong feelings about this practice. It really isn't fair to computer buyers, but most don't know the difference.

Anyway, my friend is very excited by the thought of getting a Mac. He views it as his own personal way of getting back at Microsoft for foisting overpriced software on him and his company. I'm always happy to help someone get a Mac, the more the merrier!