|
The Switch
Switching from a PC laptop to an Mac laptop was by no means as easy as Apple makes it out to be. I spent eighteen hours making the switch last weekend. This is a little more than anticipated when compared to switching between PC laptops. Other switches I have made between PC laptops take an average of twelve hours to perform. It took an additional six hours to switch mainly due to data migration between Windows and OS X applications and the build up of Windows XP Pro under VirtualPC.
Here is the list of tools I had to work with:
Let me now walk you through making the actual switch.
I did a lot of research before making the decision to switch. I inventoried all of the applications I used on my PC laptop to determine of if all of my application were supported under OS X. As it turned out, only two applications were not supported; Visio and Rio AudioManager. I also needed to be able to access my email archives in Outlook. I stumbled upon VirtualPC. I was a little uneasy about spending a lot of time in a virtual machine as I have used VMware's Workstation for application testing in the past and found it to be very slow. I did additional research and found that people have had no problems with the performance of VirtualPC on OS X while working on heavily graphical documents. I spend a lot of time in Visio developing network and system diagrams. I decided to give it a shot and have not been disappointed.
Once I determined that all of my applications could run under OS X, I embarked on a mission to figure out how I could migrate all of my data. Moving most of my documents and file was a snap since OS X has Windows file sharing available as a service. This service, and all other file sharing services in OS X, are powered by Samba. Great. Now I've got all of my documents and files moved.
The next big step was to migrate all of my Outlook data to Entourage, since I had decided to purchase Microsoft Office v. X. Microsoft does not provide an direct import functionality from Outlook to Entourage. (Hmm. I wonder why?) I found some Apple scripts that provided this functionality at www.applescriptcentral.com. The scripts cost twenty dollars, but well worth the money. I was able to move everything, but it wasn't as straightforward as pointing the scripts at my .pst file and tell it to go. What I had to do was export from Outlook each data set I wanted to import into Entourage according to the instructions that came with the scripts. Once exported, the process was pretty smooth. I just pointed the scripts as the text files and they ran as advertised. These scripts were by far the most valuable pieces of software I used during the switch. Without them, I could not have done it and probably would not have decided to by a Mac.
Let me take this opportunity to make a plug for Entourage. It is a great application. It is far superior to Outlook in a number of ways, not to mention it is a lot easier to use. The one feature that I have discovered in Entourage is its message threading feature. Entourage keeps track of how all of your messages are linked via replies and forwards. In the header bar of the preview pane, you can easily jump through an entire conversation without having to search for the messages. This is extremely useful. Entourage also makes heavey use of categories. Categories allow you to group your data so that you can keep your personal stuff separate from your work stuff. I also find this very useful.
Once I had my Outlook data in Entourage, I was off to build Windows XP Pro under VirtualPC. This was a piece of cake. Once I got VirtualPC installed, it was just like building any other Windows machine. I did spend quite a bit of time in Visio this past week and am happy to report that I only experienced minor performance problems when resizing an image or zooming in and out. I installed Visio, Microsoft Office, and Rio AudioManager in Windows XP Pro under VirtualPC without any problems. There are a ton of very nice features in VirtualPC. The one I like the best is "shared folders". By setting up a shared folder, you can access a folder on the hard drive at the same time that OS X is accessing it. This allows me to keep all of my documents in one place while using both operating systems.
Setting up the Airport card was a bit of a challenge. I was using 128-bit WEP on my wireless network. The Airport card didn't like this. I had to turn WEP off in order to get it to work. This is unfortunate as I am now running an open wireless network at home.
Another challenge that I ran into was getting the D-Link Bluetooth adpater to work properly with the Palm Hotsync Manager. I found an article that illustrated how to set up Bluetooth synchronization, but it still didn't work. I had to reboot my machine once I enabled the Bluetooth port in the Hotsync Manager. This was not documented anywhere.
Installing Norton Internet Security Suite was a relative breeze, but I does take over all security services on the machine once it is installed. I still haven't figured out how to enable Windows file sharing successfully without turning off the firewall.
I took a look at two different multi-network IM clients once I had my laptop up and running. I took a look at Proteus and Fire. I decided to go with Fire because it was a lot easier to use than Proteus and it is free. So far, I have had no problems communicating with anyone using Fire.
Migrating Radio UserLand was quite simple. I had tested the migration process on an iBook I had on loan from one of my clients. I did notice that when you shut down Radio on OS X, it looks like it is closing a bunch of different windows at once. The behavior is that my screen flickers a lot and a lot of rectangles appear on the screen and close in on themselves. Actually using the Radio application is a lot easier on OS X than Windows.
I use AT&T WorldNet as a dial-up ISP while I am on the road. They support OS X, but don't have a customized dialer for it. You have the use Internet Connect to make the connection. This would be OK if you had a list of phone numbers that you could easily look up, but they don't publish the list. I am sure this is because they change fairly frequently. However, this was more than a little annoying. I did find a work around for this by locating the "phone book" on my PC laptop and copying it to my Mac. It is just a text list, but it will work.
All in all, I am very happy with making the switch. I am finding that I can mold the way I want to work to the machine rather than the other way around. My TiPB (Titanium PowerBook) is getting its first road test this week during a trip to Los Angeles. I am sure it will perform just fine, but road testing a valuable part of hardening any machine.
What I have learned from making the switch is that you don't have to confine yourself to WinTel if you are a business user. There are other options out there. Believe me, my TiPB is all business. I have also learned that there are not a lot of machine out there capable of performing as a business machine/entertainment unit/development machine. My TiPB performs all three functions very well. Finally, I have learned that in order to be optimally efficient you have to engineer your computer to the way you work and live. We spend far too much time working, traveling, and in front of the computer to be confined by poor hardware and software integration, poorly tested and thought out applications, and sloppy code. Life is about living. Let's get on with it.
© Copyright 2003 Dann Sheridan 
Last update: 7/1/03; 7:54:20 AM.
|
