I, too, was once an irrational Apple hater.
I used to say that since a Mac couldn’t use “X” piece of hardware, then it was inferior. Then, when I became a business owner, I started looking at computers differently.
Flashy hardware and astronomical benchmarks became secondary to “will it do what I want to do, day in and day out, without me having to mess with it.”
What the computer could do became secondary to what the computer was.
Anti-virus/Anti-spyware programs, defraggers, registry cleaners, etc., are time suckers and waste money. I bought them, kept them updated, used them, but still somehow Windows computers would get infected, corrupted or in some other fashion taken offline.
I went with Macs because I can focus on doing my REAL job, running a business, not being a glorified IT guy. For those few programs that I must have that only run on Windows, I have VMWare Fusion.
I didn’t do it for the prestige of owning Macs. I didn’t do it for the politics of the board of directors. I didn’t do it because Rush uses Macs. I did it because they WORK better than Windows machines.
And THERE is the real reason we are Mac users.
Never had a virus in over twenty years, never have problems with any of my machines (I'm talking home machines, not the servers I support and most of the time it's because a drive died but since it's RAID 5 or 10 plus hot spare, I never see the problem except when the management software goes red and announces a dead drive, within four hours, I get a replacement. While the hot spare had already rebuilt itself and is running just fine).
Drive arrives, take 45 seconds to hot swap it and the drive rebuilds we go on, no problems. We also keep some spare hard drives just in case.
I've never bought a registry cleaner, let me guess, you get a pop up and it says you may have problems with your registry, your run their tool (scam) and low and behold, there numerous registry problems so you buy their 'tool' and it 'fixes' your registry, social engineering at its finest.