I know I’m not the first longtime PC user to change to a Mac, but I can’t believe how much it has transformed my day to day computing. I love it.
I love being able to use my old monitor when I’m at my desk. All I had to do was buy a monitor adapter and it knew what to do. A window popped up that allowed me to set my preferences for each window, and that was it. I keep the monitor open with my browser and keep mail open and do other work on the laptop screen. My mouse can fly back and forth without problems.
I like Dashboard open on the laptop when I’m working on the big monitor. (see above) I can play with my hula girl, look at the weather, translate something, look something up, whatever. Very cool.
Paul and I always had to do work-arounds in order to make PDF’s when we needed to. He had the full version Acrobat on his computer, and I didn’t. But the Mac comes with the capability to create a PDF no matter what you’re doing and view or modify them in a program called Preview.
I like how it operates. It is lightning fast to boot up. The logic of folder management, renaming files, all of that is intuitive and easy. I feel I have a better handle than I ever had of where my files are. Things that were always troublesome on my PC like burning DVD’s or making a reliable backup are easy on the Mac.
Oh, and backups. Be still my heart! Time Machine is a program that backs up your whole computer, every hour. I have a cute little hard drive (see the little red drive to the right of the laptop, above?) connected to it whenever I am at my desk and it keeps me perfectly up to date. If you deleted something last week, go on back and get it. And if you change to a new computer or something happens to this one you can restore your programs and everything from the Time Machine backup. Plus, isn’t it cool to look at? The image below shows my backups, each going back in time.
What didn’t I like? Mostly things having to do with the conversion. I had been using MS Outlook on my PC and in order to bring my contacts into my Mac (using the Mac mail program) I had to create Vcards for all of them, email them to myself, save all the attachments in a folder, and then import the Vcards to Mail. I used the “notes” field frequently in Outlook and this was the only way I could import that field along with the rest. But it worked!
Also there are issues for us relating to video chats. We can use the webcam and iChat with other Mac users but our boys have PC’s and the only way we can do video chats seems to be Skype, and that means I have to impose on them to install it and I hate to do that. So we will probably just use the PC when we want to video chat with someone who uses a PC.
The only software I have bought is Photoshop Elements for Mac. We were Photoshop users on the PC but we can do everything we need to with Elements. And it was $89 for two computers. I downloaded FileZilla for FTP, Firefox browser, Flip4Mac to view WMV files on the Mac, NeoOffice and I think that’s it.
I also like that my old PC is now fully dedicated to downloading. We download television and movies and having that be separate from the computer I use is a big plus for me.
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March 5th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Nancy,
I almost made the change about 5 years ago but I needed a desktop and at that time the cost of the changeover in hardware and software was more than I wanted to pay. Actually I’ve not had any problems with Photoshop using PC’s although my foto friends who use Macs don’t believe me when I say that. But I’ve never known anyone who switched from PC to Mac who was unhappy. Enjoy.