Switching Back (to Mac)

[Last Updated: 1/15/2023]

Editorial note: I just wanted to chime in her to say that my switch back to Mac stuck. When this article was published, in August 2008, I was still using a Windows machine at work. But that changed at my next job, starting in 2012. Since then, I’ve been been using Macs at work and at home.  

My new iMac arrived last week, so I’ve been busy porting over files, installing software, and learning about OS X and all things iMac (that’s Haden an me, playing around with Photo Booth).

Back in the day, I was a Mac guy.  My dad bought me a nice Mac Classic II toward the end of my undergraduate studies.  I love it and got very familiar with its ins and outs.  I learned how to program HyperCard and even did some MIDI work with it, though it was mostly a word processing machine (via MacWrite II and Claris Works).  After that, I upgraded to a Mac Performa 631CD, which was a 68040-based machine with a CD drive (rare at the time) and a color monitor (now I feel old).

When the Performa died, I was in grad school and had access to some nice Quadras via the media production lab.  I could access those at any hour of the day or night.  And I was broke anyway, so I didn’t bother to replace it.

Since then, I’ve had two Windows laptops (both Dells).  The first ran Windows 98, which I later upgraded to Windows 2000.  My most recent one, which I still have, came with Windows XP Home, which I later upgraded to Windows XP Professional.

And, you know, Windows XP is fine.  It’s a pretty solid and easy to use operating system.  But my laptop was just too slow and old.  And, since I can run XP on Mac hardware (for those times when I need it), I figured, why not see if the grass is greener?  There’s never been any love lost between me and Microsoft, even though a big part of what I do, professionally, is teach people how to use their products.

So, since last week, I’ve been busy.  I’ve ported all my photographs from Adobe Photoshop Elements (I was still using version 3.0) to iPhoto.  I ported all my iTunes music, but the external drive where it lives took a dive (thanks for nothing, LaCie), so I’ll have to reinstall that from backups (thank to you, SyncBack) and port it again (the media is the same, but the paths are specified differently on WinXP compared to OS X).  My photos also lived on that drive that went down (and were also backed up, thankfully).  And I had set up WMware Fusion (running WinXP as the guest OS), so I could keep editing them as I had in the past.  But, after the drive died, I pulled everything from backups and dropped it all into iPhoto.  I’ll still need Fusion to run some WinXP-only apps like Sony Acid Pro, but that’s just for legacy audio production files.

So far, so good.  I’ve been really enjoying OS X, the extra screen real estate, and the overall speed and performance boost.  Thanks to lots of chatting with my Mac friends, I’ve been getting my box lined out with the software I need.  So far, that means TextWrangler, NeoOffice, Skype, plus the aforementioned VMware Fusion and nice built-in apps like iChat.

And, since I can’t sleep at night without a decent automated backup solution (and since I no longer have any confidence in my other–still working–LaCie drive), I bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book drive and have Time Machine saving all my stuff to it.