Responding to a couple of posts complaining about how annoying Windows can be, mattOB reasonably asked why I bother using it.

Sometimes the decision is made for me by work; I think our Systems department would take a dim view of me unistalling Windows and replacing it with openSuse. But often the decision is mine and this is why....

Photos

Perhaps the main use of my computer at home is organising, editing and printing digital photos. F-Spot on Linux is good but Photoshop Elements is much better. Now that I have a larger memory card than I can easily fill, I also take quite a few videos. There is nothing I've found on Linux that comes close to Roxio Converter. The longest part of creating a video DVD is waiting for the project to encode.

Music software

I enjoying playing music and making it with my computer. Now this is an area where Mac does score highly. I went to a very entertaining Apple presentation called Guitarists and the Mac (link does require registration for the online seminar) and left seriously considering buying a Mac Mini. Then I remembered that I had actually done everything that had been demonstrated with my PC and Cakewalk Guitar Tracks Pro 3. And even music software from the cheaper end of the market such as Magix Music Maker is supplied with gigabytes of samples to use.

Games

Not that much of a pastime these days but important none the less. I enjoy Frozen Bubble but there's just more written for Windows. Not to mention the better support from graphic card manufacturers.

Because every else does

Ok, I know what sort of reaction that reason deserves, but bear with me. As a writer/review I need to understand the experiences of my readers and the vast majority use Windows. When I'm designing web pages I need to recognise that while I use Firefox and Opera, most people use Internet Explorer.

Now that can be maddening. I was reading this morning about creating rounded boxes on webpages. Firefox can do this with one line of code. One line. That's it. The same thing in IE involves using Javascript of reams of code with lots of small fiddly images. But what's the point of a great design if only 15% of people will ever see it.

This isn't an exhaustive list but hopefully shows that there are some good reasons why I use Windows.