"I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I'm repelled. To them, I'm a sheep. And they're right. I'm a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I'm also a masochist. And that's why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life."

I've just installed Snow Leopard, Apple's new operating system version 10.6 and it's working very nicely on my quad Intel Mac Pro (Snow Leopard is the first version of OS X that does not support older Power PC Macs). As it is optimised for Intel the speed benefits are apparent as soon as you start using it and it has a number of attractive new features.

There are a few things to watch, however.

I have client reports of simply putting the new Snow Leopard disk in and upgrading. It didn't go well. These Macs have, in some cases, become extremely unstable.