Buying a mac pro = becoming indefinitely happy?

A lot happier working on windows using vmware and bootcamp, then on my old Zepto machine. This is not a question of religion, it's a question getting work done, instead of rebooting waiting, waiting, waiting ... rebooting again, waiting, waiting ... I can now have several virtual machines working alongside and get more done.

It all started about two years ago, I kind of wondered why a number of the speakers a the yearly JAOO conference used macs, running windows in a vm and running the presentations on mac. Having tried out vmplayer on a windows machine, I was not convinced I would use a vm as my primary platform of development. After the conference I fell into a conversation with a developer from a company developing software for mac os, and he told me that buying a mac would make me indefinitely happy -- nah.. I said I'm also developing software for windows machines, this will not work for me I told him.

The next year at JAOO even more people showed up with macs under their arms. I the meantime my old Zepto computer showed signs of fatigue and dispair, and I had an eye on the new IBM X300. I've previously been very satisfied with IBM X-series, and was looking all over the internet for info on how this beast would perform with vista 32bit as well as 64 bit. Disappointed I was, sticking 4 GB RAM in the X300 would only be recognized by the 64 bit version of windows - the 32 bit version will only recognize 3 GB. With this in mind I took a much keener interest in the mac-people, and asked around if it was truly possible to work on Visual Studio in a windows vm on mac. The answer came to me as my company hired a student programmer, who just bought a mac pro 17" screen and all the bells and whistles imagineable.

The student programmer previously running an IBM T-series computer, was really convinced, he refused to use the company paid IBM notebook, and asked for permission to use his own mac pro to develop windows applications. Permission granted, he never complained and seemed to be indefinitely happy. This put things into context for me, and asked the company to spend the extra money buying a brand new mac pro, even with the new design, and threw myself off the windows cliff and into the sea of mac users.

So far this has been a VERY pleasant experience. Of course trees will not grow all the way into heaven, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with the flexibility I get, being able to run whatever I like, f.x. having a development environment for Visio Studio 2008 and one for Java, C++ or whatever. AND the last time I restarted my mac was because it ran out of power 14 days ago. No more restarting, just restart the vm which of course takes a bit of time, but is a lot faster than rebooting the machine.

Am I indefinitely happy? Well I'm surprised how well it works switching between vm, apps, learning new shortcuts. I probably will not become a pure 100% mac-man over night, but I do like the products. Even though the latest update from apple makes my mac behave a bit weird - like refusing to go into sleepmode when I close the screen; the fan running like crazy and the computer becoming rather hot. This has happend a few times lately, and I can't find a remedy on any forum. Knowing this, I also know that I just sold my soul to another company entity - but I am happy until the day my computer catches fire at least.