Recent posts may have made it seem that to me the Mac is all wonderful, and Windows is all nasty. That hasn’t been quite the case. In order to balance things up, I thought I ought to list a few Mac niggles too.

My most major issues are to do with older peripherals. I have an old HP Scanjet 2100C, which OS X failed to configure for Image Capture. Hunting around revealed SANE, which I managed to get up and running, but it was fiddly, still didn’t work with Image Capture (but does with Photoshop Elements), and has an issue where it takes ages to start to scan (debug mode shows that the driver repeatedly resets the scanner before it starts). Very much like the Linux world, and part of that which I wished to avoid.

The Epson R300 printer is the other niggle. Out of the box, it works, but Mac OS X uses a beta gimp-print (more Linux cast-offs) and the print quality for word processor documents is quite disappointing (with no settings that I can find to change, anywhere). So, I download the Epson driver from Epson, and although it works nicely when the printer is plugged into the Mac, I can’t find a way of configuring it to run over the network.

Firefox has crashed unexpectedly a couple of times, when it doesn’t seem to on Windows and once when recovering from “Safe Sleep” the keyboard was locked and I had to reboot.

The contrast between the normal Mac world, and when things don’t work is very stark – the typical Mac user must be so comfortable wrapped in Mac OS X cotton wool, these issues must be very difficult to cope with.

Of course, overall I am very happy.