I think it would be safe to say that 95% of people have a Windows as their first computer. I was no different! I picked up the windows system pretty quickly and after a few years of using it pretty much every day, I knew that operating system like the back of my hand. This year however I moved to a music production course (I got in woooh!) which is done entirely on the Mac operating system. I was very skeptical at first and didn't want to leave my precious Windows behind but I took the leap of faith..

I got the Macbook Pro in the official Apple shop in Belfast, the staff were really helpful and were move than willing to show me the benefits of getting a mac and offering me help and discount. I had the choice between the 15.4inch with 4Gb RAM and an i7 2.4Ghz or else the same with 8Gb Ram and an i7 2.6Ghz. As I was going to be using some high performance software packages, i chose the later. On purchase of the laptop I got 14% discount from my student card and also a free £70 itunes voucher which came in handy for re-stocking my itunes for fresh albums to review on this!

Out of the packet the Macbook was set up and ready to go, I just needed to type in my name and set up some basic settings before being welcomed by that beautiful Mac background. I was able to get my wi-fi up and running in no time, got all my programs installed and was really happy with how easy the operating system was to use! The layout and techniques may seem confusing at first however after a while, you'll be looking at your old Windows and thinking it was made in the 80's.

However... there I was working away at some music production and the screen just froze? I thought nothing of it.. perhaps I had just encountered a glitch in the program? I was pretty annoyed to find my work hadn't been saved but I guess that was to the fault of the program rather than the Mac. Everything worked fine for a while until suddenly it froze again, and again and I'm not joking, it must have frozen about 20 times in 2 hours! After 2 days of this treatment I was ready to throw the thing out the window. It just seemed to be unable to do anything at all that used the graphics card! I phoned up Apple-care (which I got for another £200 on top of the purchase) and got some help from a guy that told me keys to hold down during start-up to restart the entire system. This seemed to work for a while but now it keeps freezing again!

I love this thing so much... It kind of makes me feel bad to criticize something that cost so much and runs so smoothly when not using the graphics card but this is quite ridiculous. I'm heading up to the Apple store this weekend and I'll be more than happy to update this review with a much better rating if it gets fixed. I've got some experience with hardware and building computers and my guess is I've just been given a dodgy graphics card/logic board.