The Ugly Side of Being a Switcher.............(for me)................

I was a Windows user for quite a while (actually the year Windows 95 came out to be exact). And I still use Windows everyday at work. But this past summer I decided to make "the switch". I already had a Mac mini that I'd "played" with for a year and a half or so but my primary machine was a custom built (by me) Windows box. This rig ran like a raped ape! Blazing fast,never crashed, and was on 24/7 for at least a year.
But alas I fell victim to the Apple hype machine. Sort of. I mean I have ALWAYS been a gui guy. I've had been a customer of the Stardock suite of products, I was always playing around with alternatives to the Windows Explorer shell (I spent a LOT of time playing with and using Litestep). So you can see I'm drawn to eye candy and we all know that Apple has plenty of that!

So this summer in a one week period of time I purchased a 24" iMac (for me) and a 15" Macbook Pro for my wife. BIG investment (as I pay cash for everything I buy)to undertake but I was ready and my wallet was equipped! So one month into my purchase my iMac started to lock up randomly and the only fix was to reboot. But after about a day and a half of that my machine just refused to boot past a blue screen(sounds Windowzy doesn't it?). I called Apple and they said that I needed to take it to an Apple authorized repair center. I drop it off and they call to tell me the hard drive is bad...no big deal...it happens. This was July. End of August it starts doing the same thing. Take it BACK to the repair center and they diagnose a bad hard drive AGAIN. I call them on the day it should be done and they say that they are having "more troubles". The next day I am told that the logicboard needs to be replace!! Good lord! A $2000 computer that has failed twice in just a few months?!

Again, it happens. But NOW as of two days ago my machine is now starting to get weird again. Not anything like before. It runs like a beast. BUT if I walk away and let the display shut off (power saving), when I come back it takes the machine about 2 minutes to get up to speed. It'll show the busy icon (beachball)and I can't open or close anything for the whole two minutes. Once I get past that point all is well.

I am stumped. And this is part of my switching agony. If this were Windows I would at least know where to start. The task manager would show me what process is hogging the resources, but the Apple Activity Monitor shows things that I am unsure of. So now I have the whole learning thing to do over. Spending hours Googling the items that show up in the Activity Monitor. What sucks about that is the fact that there are fewer Apple owners than Windows. So my search results are not as good as if I were searching for a Windows problem......Less documentation.

So tonight I get to go home and start killing apps one at a time to see if it is an app. Then I get to start disconnecting hard drives (I have three externals) to see if it is one of those.

Ok, enough venting!! I need to do some work.

BTW, I HAVE done all the "Apple" things that people recommend. Like repairing permissions (wtf is that? what does it do? I obviously have no *nix background)