A Windows expert tries out a Mac for his daily work part 2.
This maybe of interest for quite a few curious Windows users or if you are seriously thinking of trying an Apple Mac cumpter system out.
I have summarised part 1 and part 2 and he is about 1 month into his trial. Check the link above to access the full article and the first part but here is the main guts of how things are going for him up to now.
Once over the initial hump, his Mac experience has been superb.I have done part 2 first so you can get a feel straight away for how things are going now and then read on for the details of his initial feelings and problems.
Scot Finnie CommunicationsDecember 06, 2006 (Computerworld)
Part 2 Summary
Last month, I initiated a three-month trial of the Macintosh as a total replacement for my primary Windows machine. That computer is asked to pull double duty as a work and personal machine. It’s also the only computer I run e-mail on. And it’s the one machine (other than backup) that contains all my data files. In other words, it’s got to work flawlessly.I’ve had serious pain switching to the Mac (we’ll get to that in a moment), but I’ve also had great success and no second thoughts about my experiment.
Enter a brand-new, 2.33-GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro 17 with a 160GB hard drive and glossy screen. I love this new 17-in. MacBook Pro. The screen is glorious. The performance is top-notch. It became my primary computer about 10 seconds after it first booted.If I decide to go back to Windows when this Mac trial is over, returning to my ThinkPad T60 Core Duo may be a very difficult move. I’ve settled into the MacBook Pro 17 and Mac OS X 10.4.8 as if I was born to them. If the Mac OS doesn’t mesmerize me to the point that I lose all interest in Windows, this piece of hardware might just do that all on its own. My only complaint is that the spacebar squeaks whenever I press it. Whoop-de-doo. I’ll head to the nearest Genius Bar and see if I can get Apple Computer to replace it free of charge.Why can’t Dell, Hewlett-Packard or even Lenovo build notebook hardware this good?Now back to part 1 and how he initially started and felt.
Macintosh trial run
So, about a month ago I decided it was high time to do my homework on other systems in the only way I know that works: total immersion.
Beginning this week, for at least one month — maybe three — I’m making an Apple MacBook Pro my main work and personal computer. I’ve been slowly building up the software and systems I need to do this (with the excellent help of Computerworld’s IT department), including Lotus Notes for Macintosh and the migration of my 13-year-old Eudora for Windows installation. I may rely to some extent on Parallels for the Mac to run some things in an XP virtual machine, especially in the beginning. But the goal, as I said, is to find Macintosh tools for everything I do in Windows.
To those of you who’ve been reading me for years because of my Windows expertise and insights, I’m not letting go of Windows! I will be echoing my experience on my current Windows production machine — a dual-core ThinkPad T60 — by upgrading to Windows Vista. I have access to four Macs, three of which are Intel-based. There are more than 15 Windows machines that I use and test with. It’s a Windows world, and I’m not dropping out.
But I’m committed to giving the Mac a fair chance.
Lotus Notes. IBM is promising better support for the Mac in the Notes 7.x time frame. We’re using Notes 6.5.x and other than the pathetic Mac support, it’s working just fine. (I may test the Notes 7.02 client in the near future though.) These are the problems that Mac users face the most — integrating with IT systems in the corporate world. Sometimes there is no support at all for certain applications. Microsoft, for example, withdrew support for Internet Explorer on the Mac several years ago — not that it really offered compatibility with enterprise Web-based applications anyway.
There’s hope, though, with the growing popularity of Firefox, which is platform-independent and works more or less the same way on the Mac and Linux as it does on the PC. (This is especially true of Firefox 2.0.)
For reasons I’m still figuring out, Notes has been troublesome on my Mac. During the first several days, I experienced frequent crashes of the Notes client. Working with my IT department, we weren’t sure whether the problem was the result of issues with the MacBook Pro itself or whether it was my Notes installation. We reinstalled the Mac OS X 10.4 operating system from the ground up and then reinstalled Notes and my other corporate applications. The frequency of the Notes crashes diminished, but any crashing isn’t acceptable. So we installed the Notes client on a second MacBook Pro 15 and found the problems were evident there, too. More than likely, there’s something amiss in my Notes mail database or the client configuration. I figured out a work-around that keeps the client from crashing, and I suspect that it will lead us to the proper solution. But there’s no joy yet.
Once the Notes problem is fixed, I will go through the wild and crazy steps required to migrate Windows Eudora to Mac Eudora, and move into the Mac. I’ve also ordered a 17-in. Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, which is due in a week or so.
About other aspects of the Mac: I’m having little trouble adapting to the differences between Windows and the Mac. I was a Mac user from 1987 to 1990 and a Windows and Mac user from 1994 to 1995. Mac OS X is a different operating system from the old Mac OS software. But my Linux experience, though not considerable, has helped me log in and out of root to change system settings on the Mac with relative ease (once I knew where to initiate the authentication). Exploring the way the Mac works is actually fun. I wouldn’t call the more esoteric settings intuitive, but they’re not difficult to find if you keep at it.
If learning Linux esoterica is comparable to doing The New York Times crossword puzzle, the Mac is tantamount to whipping through the crossword puzzle in your local-yokel newspaper. And Windows is somewhere in between.
Progress on the temporary-Mac front will be reported in future updates. And I expect to wrap up with a final assessment of whether the Mac is a viable alternative for real people with real jobs. You can also expect a long-term wrap-up on Windows Vista once it’s officially out.
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