Saying Goodbye to Windows (Official Mac Cult Member Now)

Current Tunes: Corrosion of Conformity - Kiss of Death

Favorite activity I participated in today? I deleted the hard drive partition on my Macbook. What this means is I no longer have a Windows operating system on this laptop and it is now 100% Mac OS X. Ever since I updated to Snow Leopard on my Mac, the need to have Windows boiled down to one single service: gaming. But on further elaboration, I determined that wasn’t much of a reason to keep Windows around, so I banished that evil Microsoft product from my system forever. I don’t intend on looking back.

I’ve been playing video games for pretty much all of my conscious life. I remember getting an original Nintendo Entertainment System when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, and that insidious little device dominated a good portion of my young life. That was the start of this behavior that’s persisted for all these years. Slowly though, as month on month has gone by, I’ve grown more resistant to the charm of video games, enough to safely say that I think their hold on me is gone. I no longer own even one console system, I’ve quit all of those foolish (and addictive) Facebook games, and now Windows is gone.

This isn’t to say that I’ll never spend another second playing video games again. I’m sure I’ll pick one up from time to time, and that’s ok. I just don’t feel myself as attracted to them as I used to be. In social situations, I think it’ll be acceptable to indulge in a little gaming time. Or even on my own, as something fun and relaxing to do to bring a little variety to the daily routine. I’m happy about this though. I’m glad I’m giving them up.

When I go to an electronics store, let’s say Best Buy, I often have this experience that I keep repeating. I’ll walk by the video game section, and I’ll see a game that appeals to me on some level, and I’ll pick it up and look at it and think to myself how I want to play it. But very quickly that feeling subsides when I think about both the financial costs of the game, and the unseen cost: the time I would spend on that game that could be spent reading, writing, learning, growing, being. I don’t know if it’s possible to completely eliminate that urge to pick up a game, drool over it, and become enraptured by the desire to play it and escape from the world inside the game. But if I could indeed eliminate those desires, that’d be nice I believe. It would simplify my life a little more.

After deleting the partition, it dawned on me I’ve completely unconsciously been devoting significant money to improving my computer experience in different ways. There was the new operating system software, which really wasn’t much money at all. I also purchased a Bluetooth mouse the other day, which should arrive in the mail next week, in order to free up one of the only two USB ports I have on the laptop. Now, after deleting Windows and going back to only one operating system, I have significantly more hard drive space. That’s almost a greater boon than the whole “no more video games” thing.

I had been meaning to delete the partition about a month ago, but I kept putting off. I kept living under this silly delusion that I still needed to hold on to Windows in case of whatever unforeseen circumstances might arrive. That was just worrying over something that won’t happen. This was just another case of me overthinking things, and letting that process bog me down and inhibit me from getting important thing done. But again, I triumph.