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My dad asked me recently what kind of small form-factor PC he should buy. My response was highly biased by my interest in his switching to a platform I have more experience with. I'm not enthusiastic about offering desktop support, even for my family, but they could at least notice that I haven't used Windows much lately.

He's too set in his ways to switch to Linux, so I volunteered to buy him a Mac Mini and set it up to dual-boot Vista, in the hope he would eventually try out Leopard. I had a copy of Vista that I won at a Microsoft recruiting event, which I subsequently failed to sell on eBay. I had also won a redundant iPod Nano from Google in their Treasure Hunt contest. Every Mac should come with a free iPod, so I pitched that in the deal too.

Next to all these software companies wasting perfectly good schwag on me, the saddest part of the story is that, from the resigned tone of his complaints about Vista, it sounds like he's going to keep running Windows.

Labels: anecdote, apple, google, microsoft, vista