Every time I finish a book I try to sit back, look at the working process of the months before and ask myself: how did that go? Not in terms of the book itself but in how I managed the process. How much time did I waste in over-researching the thing? What can I try to do better next time round?

On this occasion the conclusion has been pretty earth-shattering, and one I could never have predicted. As I related earlier I found myself revising this book in Venice not with my customary Mac but with a ThinkPad and the beta version of Word 2010. For Windows. Yes, the dread Windows, the computer OS creative people are supposed to shun.

After much thought my conclusion is this: Apple can take a hike. Mainly – though not entirely – through Word 2010, I’m going to see what it’s like to be a Windows-based writer for a while. Maybe, who knows, forever.

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Why am I doing this? Principally because Word 2010 <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2010/05/05/word-2010-for-windows-wonds-well-hidden/">feels the best word processor for my working habits I’ve yet encountered</a> – after some tweaking. But it also coincides, if I’m frank, with some growing misgivings I’ve had about the Apple route for some time.

I bought my first Mac in 1984. Macs are great. Apple, on the other hand, seem to drift ever further towards egotistical control freakery with each passing year. The clincher that finally drove me into the arms of Windows was the discovery that I’d been rooked over the purchase of my very expensive 24-inch Apple LED Cinema display. It’s just a computer monitor, right? A very nice one.

Well no actually it isn’t. It’s a computer monitor that’s got only one connection port, a port designed to work only with the latest Macs (not even ones from a couple of years ago). Can you just buy a cheap adapter to hook up a Windows machine or a DVI-based Mac?

No. After hours of searching I found the Apple store sell a £100 -- <em>£100! – </em>converter to do the job, a little box with one more power lead to stow somewhere.

I bought it immediately. We Mac users do that, don’t we? It didn’t work. The boot screen came up for Windows then the screen went blank. I called Apple for a return.

‘Do you want to speak to a tech support guy?’ the lady asked.

I thought for a moment and said, ‘No thanks.’

It’s a computer monitor. Not a religious artefact. I should be able to plug it into anything I want. Same goes for Apple’s very nice chiclet keyboard. Yes, that works on Windows too, but not the special keys. Why? Because Apple don’t make the drivers generally available. To get them you need to copy them from Boot Camp on your OS X DVD somehow. Without that effort even the volume controls don’t even work.

I make the point again: it’s a bog standard computer peripheral. Why should I have to jump through these hoops? The whole point about Apple used to be about how easy things used to be. Now it’s about control: our way is the only way. If you don’t like it buy something else.

So I have. When I thought about it I realised there was only one piece of software I’d miss on Windows – Scrivener. Maybe that will prove a killer. Certainly its ‘equivalents’ on Windows, PageFour and Liquid Story Binder, don’t grab me at all. Until there’s a Scrivener for Windows, I’m going to try mapping out the next book in Word 2010 from the start. And instead of MacJournal for my book diary I’m going to use OneNote.

This may be madness. I’ll know in a few months I guess if I have to go crawling back to the Mac, doffing my cap to Mr Jobs by way of apology. But hell, it’s worth a try. I haven’t used Windows seriously for years and I have to say right now it feels very good indeed.

So this week I’ll try to offer a few insights for anyone else out there who might be thinking of abandoning the increasingly closed world of the Mac for the open and occasionally anarchic one of Windows, and explaining the working system I’m gradually developing using Office 2010. And if you’re vaguely interested in all this yourself remember – you can <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx" target="_blank">download the beta for free here</a>. It works very well indeed, and will continue to do so until it expires in October.

Here’s where my Mac is living right now. I wonder if it’ll stay there. Tomorrow, what’s replaced it.

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