If you talk to the average Windows user and mention you use a Macintosh the usual reaction is one of scorn. They love to tell you Macintosh users are stupid and the OS is just a toy in comparrison to Windows. Well over the last 2 years me and my son Jaime have been making these Windows users eat their own words and have been turning a few heads.

 At the beginning of 2007 me and my son decided to enroll in Baulkham Hills TAFE to do a Diploma in Systems Administration, but guess what, when the teachers interviewed us and found out we were Macintosh users they laughed at us and said "This is a Windows based course, there is no way you guys could pass. If you insist on doing a course here a Certificate 4 in Help Desk is the highest course we will enrol you in and the chances are you won't pass it anyway". Well we showed them.

First off we both bought new MacBook Pros, next we installed VMWare Fusion on our Macs and then installed Windows XP Pro. The first month or two was pretty hard getting our heads around this foriegn OS but we persevered and by the time we had to face exams we were churning along. Actually not churning, we were excelling.  While the rest of our class were using Windows boxes, we found we could do everything they could do on our Macs and do it better than they could natively under Windows. We became known around campus as "The Mac Guys".

When the other class members had problems such as viruses, trojans etc, we had no such problem. When they tried to push their Windows boxes to the limit for example running multiple Virtual Machines simultaneously so as to set up Active Directlory, DNS, DHCP, Mail Servers etc we just built new VM's on our Macintosh's with Windows Server 2003  and we could log in from our XP Pro image and everything worked like a dream. In fact we found that many of the native Windows boxes ran slower, were more buggy and even had hardware failures coping with the load. But not our Macs.

When we needed to set up multiple copies of MySQL Server and set them up for Replication our Macs were the only machines that could do it successfully. From subject to subject this pattern continued and the other students were no longer treating us and our Macs as a joke. By the end of the year we were the only two students who had been able to complete every task set. We didn't just complete these tasks we did it with style and with ease. By the time the final results came out I had topped the year and my son had come second. I even had a Distinction average and my son was close behind. We ended up 20 - 30 % ahead of the best of these lifelong Windows users. For a guy who had never touched a Windows box in his life I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

Come 2008 no teachers or students were laughing at us or our Macs any more and TAFE had no problems letting us take on the Diploma in System Administration anymore. In fact students were by now asking questions about our Macintosh's and staarted talking about getting a Macintosh of their own. When teachers had problems getting things to work they started coming to us for advice. Well guess what this System Administration Diploma didn't seem half as bad as teachers had made out. By now we were feeling pretty confident about our chances of passing since subject after subject we kept getting Distinctions while the Windows boys and girls kept struggling. By mid year it was already apparent that unless something major happened we were once again going to top the course.

Come the 2nd Semester me and my son got together and decided to try something that nobody at TAFE had ever done before. We signed up for some extra courses, in fact we signed up for every course being run at Baulkham Hills TAFE. Each of these courses should have been 12 month full time courses but by now we were feeling a bit cocky. We decided to try and complete them all in the last 6 months of TAFE. This meant we would be attempting 6 years full time worth of courses in 6 months. Now we had our work cut out for us. Were we insane, many thought so.

For the last 6 months we have been working 18 hour days, 7 days a week either in class or doing assignments. Some days according to our timetable we should have been in up to 4 or 5 classes at the same time. I now realize why nobody had ever attempted anything like this before. Our Macs though never missed a beat. At times we had 10-12 VM images on our Macs. I even joined Microsofts TechNet (their developer network), got invited to the release of Windows Server 2008 and got involved with CeBit the largest computer show in the southern hemisphere doing their advertising. Life was busy, we weren't just learning to use Windows, now we were learning to use Linux as well. The Mac OS and the VM images we were using on a daily basis now comprised of  -

• Leopard Client 10.5.5
• Leopard Server 10.5.5
• Windows XP Pro
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Windows Server 2008
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• SUSE
• CentOS
  

Now we were really being taken seriously at TAFE and gradually we started to realize we were no longer alone. The other students started buying Macs of their own. By the end of 2008 nearly 20 percent of students had bought a Mac and another 10-20 % were going to buy a Mac. We had proven they were not the toys that these students had originally thought.

Well this week we finally finished our TAFE courses, we had finished every subject and were now looking at getting a pile of certificates and diplomas. By the way we topped each class and maintained a Distinction average in every one. Next year at presentation night the teachers are now joking about how they'll have to change the name from the Baulkham Hills TAFE Awards Presentation Night to the Jaime and Greg Presentation Night.  All up we will be receiving the award for topping the following subjects -

• Certificate 3 in Application Development
• Certificate 3 in Network Administration
• Certificate 3 in Support
• Certificate 4 in General IT
• Diploma in System Administration
• Diploma in Project Management

Not bad for a couple of Mac Guys and next year we now plan on doing the same thing at university. That's right for next year we have enrolled in a Bachelor of Information, Communications and Technology (ICT). It will be interesting to see how many Windows users we can turn from the darkside at the University of Western Sydney. I bet by the end it should be a few at least. So next time a Windows user puts crap on you for being a Mac user, take it with a grain of salt because they don't know any better, but as far as me and my son are concerned Mac users are better than Windows users.