Grant Diggles

Converting to MAC from PC – My experience

// September 9th, 2009 // Technology

My brother had recently been harassing me about making the switch from the PC world over to Mac. Well, I bit the bullet and have made the switch and here are my thoughts on the process. (I will continue to add to this as I gain experience):

COMPARISONS

OPERATING SYSTEM:

PC :: Windows Vista – Windows Vista is horrrrrrible. I was part of the original testing group before Vista originally came out, and if I wasn’t completely lost in the new layout of Vista, I was busy rebooting my computer from all of the freeze-ups.

There are also several different versions of Vista as well. I was stuck with buying an out-of-the-box Gateway that came with Vista Home installed on it. I then had to upgrade Vista Home to Vista Business in order to access some of the networking features needed to use it within the office intranet. After installing Vista Business, I connected the computer to a wireless usb adapter only to find out that I needed Vista Enterprise to access the specific wireless networking features needed to work in tandem with my firewall and server.

I would recommend that you stick with Windows XP, as that systems has been relatively reliable for me from the beginning. XP still crashes from time to time, but is something I’ve come to expect using Microsoft products.

MAC :: OS X – Mac did a great job creating an operating system that is sleek and efficient. The computer starts up quickly each time and rarely bogs down or crashes. A huge selling point to MAC OS X is that there is only one version of it. After years of being taken to the “cleaners” with high prices Microsoft products, I was shocked to find out that MACs operating system, Leopard, was only about $89! Their newest operating system, Snow Leopard, is only $29 (I would recommend NOT upgrading until you make sure that all of your current programs will work correctly with Snow Leopard ( i.e. Digidesign’s Pro Tools 8 currently does not)).

OS X is intuitive, but to a seasoned Windows XP user, I still had a difficult time getting used to it for awhile. In part, because some things were so simple to do that they couldn’t be that easy. For instance, if you want to uninstall a program you simple need to drag the application from your applications folder to the Trash. Easy.

SOFTWARE:

PC – From what I can tell, PCs still have the market on software applications. Although PC software doesn’t seem to be as intuitive, the market still hugely favors PC users and most developers will simply sell to the largest market. Also, for that same reason, the market is very competitive which keeps the price of most of the software pretty low, very easy to find and many options available.

MAC – Software exclusively designed for MAC runs like a dream. It follows in the same fashion as Apple’s internal developers in that it is sleek, efficient and extremely intuitive. Unfortunately, I have found that this type of software is typically expensive. A small price to pay however for excellence.

***Running Windows on a MAC*** – There are times that, in the business world, I run across tasks that can only be accomplished with PC software (i.e. medical billing). My personal recommendation is VMware Fusion. Its has proven to be extremely stable while running both Windows XP and MAC OS X together. Several of my employees are using both operating systems in tandem on a daily business using VMware. Its worth a look.