I have been using a MacBook Pro 17in for about a year now. I will have to say that it is a great machine for work, but that is really about it. If I had my choice of a Mac and a PC for my personal use I would have to choose a PC hands down. To me there are just so many different tools, that I have grown to love, and really cannot live without, that only run on my PC.

A list of some of my favorite software that I can only seem to find on the PC are:

1. Ahead Nero
2. dBpoweramp Music Converter
3. MP3TAG
4. AnyDVD

First off I will have to say that there is no DVD Burning Suite for the Mac that can even touch Nero. I have been using it for years, and it is the best on the market. I can not only easily create DVD’s, but there is software to edit audio, movies, and even Recode DVD’s for you. I think that my favorite thing has to be the DVD Recode functionality. It has built in profiles for IPOD, PSP, ect. I mean what even compares to this on the Mac?

This in combination with AnyDVD and you will be up and running copying all kinds of DVD’s in a matter of minutes. AnyDVD is a great piece of software that run’s as a service on your machine. It then will remove the copy protection off of any DVD that is inserted into the drive. It will even remove the digital rights off of audio cd’s. How great is that.....

Second, I have not found anything that can touch the dBpoweramp Music Converter along with MP3TAG. These two pieces of software allow me to easily convert FLAC and SHN’s down to MP3’s in a matter of minutes. There are also filters that are built into the software that will convert and add the tags from the sources files to the newly generated MP3 files.

If you are are like me, and hardly ever get lucky enough to have the flac author generate the id3 tags for you, well go ahead and edit the new mp3’s with MP3TAG. This really is the best MP3 tagging software that I have ever used. It does not only allow you to easily add all different types of tags, but you can create tags file file name filters. This software has more functionality than you could imagine. I have written about this software in more detail here .

There is one thing that I have felt is lacking on the PC is linux shell support. Since the Mac OSX is built on a linux os, you can do all kinds of neat things with the command prompt like:

1. Screens
2. ssh
3. all unix file handing commands (ls, mv, cp, ect)
4. scp

I guess what really is the most important reason why I will always love my PC is because of the price difference. For what you would have to pay for a Mac ($2000+) you can buy yourself a equivalent PC for 1/2 the price. This way I can just treat my PC’s like disposable electronics, because they all break after time, and just upgrade ever few years for the same price that I would have to pay for one Mac. This is a big win in my book.

I recently got really pissed off at Netbeans 6.1 while I have been developing some projects. Every time I tried to save a workspace and create a new one, everything would go all haywire. I would have to re-import my code into a blank project, and just pray that everything would continue to work if something changed. Well since a new version of Eclipse has recently been released, I figured why not give it a shot.

Well off I went to go and download Eclipse and see what new things would be incorporated into the new release. I will have to say that this release of Eclipse is really nice. I have been very impressed with it and the Eclipse community in a whole. Not only is the new version very stable, the community has rapidly updated there tools to work with this new release.

I will say that one of the best additions is the Java Import feature. In previous releases, if you did not import a Jar, it would not tell you in a little drop down bubble and allow you to select that jar. Now it is part of the code completion bubble, which is how most other ide’s work.

I am running this software on my Mac, which did not really work very well in the last release. This release works flawlessly on my Mac, which is a big relief as well.