The 5HITS

Having recently undertaken this process of moving after many years from PC to MAC, here are the things nobody tells you but you should know before you buy and when you’ve bought. I recently moved from my Dell XPS 12″ running XP and Office 2008 to a Mac Book Pro, 15″ 2.8GHz.

Some considerations before buying a MAC

1. Everyone keeps on saying the Mac will run Windows. Yes, and in so many ways. This can be done using Bootcamp, i.e.. when you boot the machine it will boot straight into Windows, VMWare Fusion or Parallels. Both of the last 2 seem much of a muchness and the same price from reading up and talking to sales people no one could point to a clear advantage in either, other than VMWare was written later and thus could have better coding?. Price is around $120.00 and they allow you to run Windows virtually.. Remember when you buy a Mac the OS is built for the machine, so running Windows loses all those little tweaks, you are running standard software on a standard laptop not built for it. Also Windows will cost you. To get XP which most seemed to be recommended by most required buying Vista Business (The cheapest) at around $420.00 and then requesting a downgrade to get back to XP, ridiculous!
2. While the VMWare is neat and works well, it does crash every now and then and seems to affect the performance of the overall machine if not shut down properly.
3. Small thing. The power adaptor is white. This will get dirty and look untidy quickly
4. Accessories, while of high quality are expensive, and there are not as many options as you would find for PC, obviously
5. Its going to take you awhile to learn you way around the Mac OS. The logic is different but not impossible. After you a few days you realize it is actually a lot easier and better and makes Windows, dare I say it look a bit clunky.
6. Entourage and Office for Mac are not industrial grade. If you are used to large spreadsheets and documents and heavy Outlook usage then Office for Mac and Entourage will seem a little basic. The Apple guys will tell you it will do everything except Macros which is sort of true. I have found large Excel, Powerpoint and Word files with complex formulas or other inclusions will crash or open as Read Only. Also take a long time to open, even on a more powerful machine. If you are used to Office 2008 and rely on it, you may be disappointed with Office for Mac and Entourage. There are also little bits of functionality, that are either well hidden of not easy to find, like dragging margins when printing, requesting read/ receipts for email and so on.
7. Having said that, conversion of files seems on average fine
8. Entourage and Office for Mac crash, a lot. Heavy usage will bring it down. But on the upside unlike Windows this takes all of around 15 seconds to recover
9. I reckon it saves around 40 minutes – 1 hour a day in reboot time daily and the hardware is awesome, but then 3 years of XP can get bloated
10. Also a lot of Applications, some add ons in Firefox, downloadable tools etc. are just not available for Mac and in certain cases those that are are a bit of a second cousin, they have limited functionality compared to the Windows version. Make sure you understand the key applications you need and that there is a suitable Mac version available.

Tips on the changeover process

1. Get a big external HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to help with the process, at least 500GB
2. Migrating your mail: The software used by the Apple guys is O2M from Little Machines. Costs around US$10. You run it on the PC, it converts your Outlook files to MBox format and then you drag them across to the applicable application on the Mac. Easy? If you have many years of emails or large files this takes ages. To covert the last couple of years archives and emails took around 36 hours and requires supervision, mine seemed to have errors or find date issues continuously, but once done did work
3. The top level mail directories are not converted by 02M. Only folder subdirectories, unless I missed a setting but I don’t think so. You could miss all the folder level emails in Outlook unless you specifically move these to a sub folder.
4. Syncing of Calendars in a circus if you are going to use Entourage. I run an iphone and Mobileme. The biggest issue is that iCal gets involved and has different calendar types, like work, personal, home etc. Entourage only supports 1 calendar type. Of course on conversion, they get mixed up making it look like the calendars are not syncing. A trap for young players. Convert all your calendars in iCal to Entourage, solves the problem
5. If you run 2 screens or need to plug into a projector now and then you need an additional connector and need to carry this around. Buy a couple to keep at the office and in your bag, Makes life easier.
6. Those joke videos sent by mates in .wmv format don’t always work

The good

1. ITunes works a treat and if you have an Iphone, even better
2. The hardware is good looking, has a quality feel and good keyboard. This is not a laptop review, but the machine is awesome
3. Booting takes seconds and you almost never have to reboot

Good luck with your decision making. Hope those tips make the transition smoother.

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