Jul 15 2009

Intro to Mac-land

In the past, I’ve enjoyed some fairly nice computer hardware.  A fringe benefit of owning a computer business as well as a necessity for someone asking a lot of their day-to-day computer.

I’ve been using a laptop as my main computer for almost ten years.  I’ve found this works for me and suits my needs pretty well.

After a few fairly ordinary laptops, I moved up.  First, to an Acer Ferrari 3400.  A nice laptop with, for it’s day a great high res LCD was truly lovely (1400 x 1050 on a 15″ LCD).  From there it was on to a Hewlett Packard NC8430.  Again, a very nice laptop and, again, the high res LCD screen (1680 x 1050 on a 15.4″ LCD) was a joy to use.

For a variety of reasons, when it came time to consider a replacement for the nc8430 I took a bit of a tangent.  At various times over the years I’ve used (and quite liked) Apple computers – all the way back to an Apple II when I was in high school (in the very early 80′s for anyone keeping score).

So, the new laptop in my life is a MacBook (a white one).

I’ve now been using my MacBook full time for about three months.  In changing over from PC to Mac I wanted to avoid, where possible, the crutch of just using all the same software in Parallels and XP.  For me, doing that would defeat the whole point and I might as well just stay on a PC.  Instead, I set out to have the Mac be functional for all the things I do on a daily basis.

How’s it going?  Generally, I’m happy.  I’m most of the way to having a everything I need running the way I need it.

Did I resort to the cop-out?  Unfortunately, yes.

The business uses many flyers and forms in Microsoft Publisher format and, so far, I haven’t been able to locate a suitable alternative under OSX (if you know of one, please let me know).  The business uses QuickBooks for all the accounting stuff and, you guessed it, no Mac alternative.  As a result, both of these applications are in Parallels under XP and are used regularly.  So far, the only other hold-out is the software package we use to manage HP warranty repairs which only runs on Windows.  Every other task is now being handled in a native MacOS application.

On the plus side, I’m actually enjoying OSX.  It’s nice to use and seems to have fewer foibles in how I expect things to work than I was seeing under Vista on the nc8430.

On the down-side, the white MacBook was short on resources – I’ve already upgraded it to 4GB of RAM and have a 500GB hard drive on the way.  I miss the higher resolutions of my last two laptops but even the MacBook Pro doesn’t get me that kind of resolution in a 15″ LCD.

I still use Windows on a daily basis, that won’t change any time soon.  The business isn’t really going to go 100% Mac any time soon and I still deal with repairs on computers every day that are PC/Win based.  However, in the last week or so I’ve also found myself doing Mac-style things while using Windows (e.g. flick the mouse pointer up to the corner of the screen to get Expose) – obviously I’m settling into the changes.

More to come…

By David • Apple • • Tags: Apple, mac, macbook, newby, white macbook