Ok, I don't want this to be a lame "yea baby MACS Rule!!!" kind of article but it does show the reliability of the Mac hardware.

My very talented friend Mike called me up on December 27, 2002, he was in town visiting and needed some help getting some files off a data DVD he had burned on his desktop PC. For some reason the DVD drive in his VAIO could not access the data.

Mike brought the disc to my office and as suspected my Powerbook 1GB SD read it fine even though it had been formatted for a PC. But now we needed to move the file between the machines. By the way the file was a 4GB avi file he had created.

At first I thought this should be easy. Just plug him into the network and push the file between the two machines. The first major problem was that his drive was too small. His 18 month old VAIO only had a 6GB drive... TINY.

Next idea, just put the file on my iPod and let him firewire it off the drive in there. NO... the VAIO's only have a 4 pin firewire jack so you need to have a drive that can be powered externally... bummer.

Third. Can you read one of my powered firewire drives? Firewire is firewire right? NO. I guess if you have 96 percent market share there is no reason for Windows to allow their OS to read Mac disks... whatever.

Fourth... how about if I rearrange some data and move some files off of my external 80GB drive and let him reformat it. After all, I can read a PC disk no problem. So we move some data, he reformats the drive and sure enough I can now push the file from his DVD disc to my eternal drive hanging off the back of my PowerBook.

After attaching the drive to the VAIO he can now finally see the file. Luckily, all he wanted to do was do some compression on the avi file so he didn't have to actually PUT the file on his tiny drive.

Where did the Mac fail. In one area. I could have just done the compression FOR him on the powerbook except for the fact that the Mac OS could not access all of the 4GB's of data in the file, or at least Cleaner couldn't.

So that's my story. With all the trials and failures and data pushes and reformats and compressions, the afternoon took us about 5 hours. All of this because the VAIO could not reliably read a DATA DVD that was created by another PC. To bad.