I was having some challenges this past weekend on my home desktop PC running Windows XP. I was getting the dreaded hang at the Windows Splash screen (the where the flag logo shows up and the green bars scroll along the bottom of the screen) that I could not solve. Nothing had changed on my machine and I had tried all sorts of options to get my system back running based on some research I did on the Net: ran chkdsk multiple times, tried multiple different restore points, booted into safe mode, checked msconfig options and so forth. Let's just say that I spent a number of hours working on the issue to no avail and I was more than a bit frustrated.
In a last ditch effort, I was doing one last chkdsk and booting off my Windows Recovery Disk into safe mode. While the chkdsk was running (about a 3 hour process) I finally decided to take the advice of my friend Om to "get a mac." For those that know me, I used to be violently anti-Mac based on a horrific experience in the early 90s with a AppleBook that I was forced to use that continually gave me a bomb message with "Sorry a system error occurred." But, I've grown older and maybe wiser to look beyond the past. So, while my PC was running chkdsk for the third time I decided to boot my laptop and surf www.apple.com to check out the options on the iMac and MacBook Pro. I must admit they look very cool!
And just as I was checking prices, I swear, my PC completed the chkdsk and rebooted perfectly. It was up and running, no issues to be found. For fun, I rebooted it twice and it came back up perfectly (I still have no idea what the issue was or how I solved it).
So, I may be paranoid, but if AT&T was watching my web browsing and sent that information over to Microsoft, did an automated process kick in and fix my PC to avoid me becoming an Apple convert? Of course, if that was really the case, I would like to think that Microsoft would have solved the problem on my PC before I reached the frustration point of pricing a Mac. But, I wonder....
