Questions for the former PC users... (please help!)

I am not a mac user, but i do use macs in school and linux @ home, so i am not a slave to the microsoft corporation. I feel I am qualified enough to answer many of these questions.

1. don't know about mac, but took me a week to fully make a dive from Windows to Linux, should be about the same for OS X since both are very similar. it wasn't hard, granted there is a learning curve, to run a mac is mostly common sence. took me all of 1 hour to get used to OS X in school.

2. see #1

3. One thing I can say I miss is smooth gaming. this is one thing you can't do much on a mac (nor linux for that matter). Gaming is a windows thing, other than that, anything you can do on a pc, you can do on a mac (or linux box)

4. No doubt it will be expensive getting all the new software, but if you are dedicated to keeping a mac for a while, it might be worth it. it all depends on your budget, but assuming you're planning to buy a mac (and thus pay more $ for slower hardware) i assume money is not a big problem

5. PowerPC emulates x86 better than vise versa. its good for emulating your basic programs but it won't nearly be native speed.

6. I think by this question you mean more "are you happier with OS X than with Windows?" I am not a fan of OS X, but I am not a big fan of windows either. I am happy i ditched windows in favor of linux, since i am not a full time mac user, can't comment on the mac part. as far as hardware goes, its all the same, apple just sticks their logo everywhere. for instance, at one point the ibook was made by Compal.

2.

1. How difficult was it to "make the switch" to a Mac?

I started the switch while taking a design class in college. The lab was just Mac. This started my journey into that world and I do admit, it was frustrating at first because some shortcuts and things just work differently on a Mac.

2. How long did it take you to get comfortable with the Mac? (or are you still kinda lost?)

It took me about a month, I'd say. The problem I had is similar to learning a foreign language. At some point, you have to stop trying to view everything as a translation and just learning it for how it's natively said, period. Make sense? Once you get your head around that, you start to pick up a lot quicker. You stop wondering "what is a dmg file supposed to be in the PC world, and what's the PC-version of mounting a disk," and just view that as how a Mac operates. Then, it all just makes sense.

3. Is there anything you miss about the PC? Is there anything you CAN'T do on a Mac that you could with a PC?

I miss nothing at all. Everything I do on a Mac is way more stable. I don't have to worry about the OS getting in the way of what I'm doing. There is nothing on a PC that I can't do on a Mac, except access the Homestead control panel for a client. This is because they wrote it in a form of Java that is only complient with Windows. Their loss.

4. All of my software is obviously for the PC, and it would be pretty expensive to buy all new software. Do you feel it was worth having to buy all new software?

There's a lot of freeware availible that works on a Mac the same as the programs you'd have to buy on a PC. What programs, specifically, are you referring to? I wouldn't let that hold you back, honestly.

5. How good is Virtual PC? Do you recommend using it?

Never used it. Never had to use it.

6. Are you glad you made the switch, or do you prefer the PC?

I'll never go back to a PC.

ok....some of the "freeware" i think he refers to is just *nix programs. you have to slightly tweak mac os, and then you can just download source code for *nix programs and compile them to work on a mac. And yeah, there is a very wide array of *nix programs to use. Being a linux user, there is only 1 piece of commercial software on my linux partition, that is Cadega (formerly winex). it allows me to run windows games in liniux, i don't use it much though because i do have a very small (10gb) windows parition that i use for games and sync my pda.

...or not.

http://macupdate.com/

http://versiontracker.com

Tons of various apps there. All are simple drag and drop installs.

1. How difficult was it to "make the switch" to a Mac?

It wasn't difficult at all. Of course, I was familiar with Macs from my design classes, however I had never actually used one for more than light photoshopping and surfing the web while the instructor talks.

Things are different but they're not too different that they're unfamiliar. For the most part things seem to make more sense in OS X and ofttimes seem to work much more seamlessly and smoothly. One thing that's really handy on OS X is the fact that disk images can be mounted directly by the system without having to use something like Alcohol or Daemon Tools.

2. How long did it take you to get comfortable with the Mac? (or are you still kinda lost?)

As soon as I got it I was schlepping it to work with me and using it for 8 hours there and then another 4 or 5 hours at work, so it really only took me a couple days before I got comfortable with it. The biggest thing is learning how to maintain a Mac compared to Windows. I still have urges to defrag the hard drive, but you don't need to do it on Macs. Also, you don't need to restart a Mac to get back system resources gobbled up by errant programmes and I find myself having to fight that urge.

One thing you do need to do with a Mac—only if you have a laptop that isn't kept on during the night—is manually run the maintenance scripts. These are run every night between 3-4 am, and unfortunately on a laptop you have to run them yourself. There are programmes that will do this for you or you can invoke them yourself.

Also with a Mac, if things are starting to go a little pear shaped you have to repair permissions, but you don't have to do it often.

3. Is there anything you miss about the PC? Is there anything you CAN'T do on a Mac that you could with a PC?

I miss Trillian and I miss some of the games. Unlike what abf said you can game on a Mac. I was playing Neverwinter Nights earlier and it works quite well. I also play Halo and Doom 3—though Doom 3 needs to be run at really low res on my PowerBook. It's still playable however, it just looks like the original Doom, heh.

There are a few games, however, like Startopia that I miss, but I can get by without. Otherwise I could never use a PC again and it wouldn't matter to me.

4. All of my software is obviously for the PC, and it would be pretty expensive to buy all new software. Do you feel it was worth having to buy all new software?

Some software, if there are Mac versions of it, can have it's licence transferred from PC to Mac. I believe Adobe lets you do cross platform licence transfers.

I do feel it's worth it. I play to stick with Macs for a long time now.

5. How good is Virtual PC? Do you recommend using it?

VPC is good for small stuff. I run Windows ME in it and, while it's not the fastest thing around, it runs quite well. I mainly use it to unpack SimCity 4 addons since the SC4 community has decided all the sudden to start distributing them in exe installers and not the zip files they used to use.

6. Are you glad you made the switch, or do you prefer the PC?

I'm very glad.

Mail is a great little programme. It doesn't read news groups like Outlook, but I think it works great. You can also use Thunderbird and MS Office comes with Entourage, which brings me to this...

Office for Mac is much better than Office for PC, I think. The only thing it lacks is MS Access, so if you want to make a data base you're screwed.

As far as browsers go, do you realise that when people talk about speed they're talking in seconds? Safari is pretty fast, and I haven't noticed it being any slower or faster than IE. If one loads a page in 5 seconds and another in 4, are you really going to notice it? IE isn't even included with the new version of OS X because it was dropped by MS. Firefox and Mozilla have Mac versions as well as several other browsers.

As far as font rendering goes...last year I would've said it was true, that ClearType is better, and in some respects it is. However, OS X does have a very good rendering engine and I have absolutely no problems reading anything on the screen. This week I was forced to use Windows as my PowerBook had to go away for a repair, and I found some of the same fonts on Windows just looked ugly compared to how they look in OS X.

can't say much for the Mail program since i don't use mac like i said, but, to me Thunderbird is better than MS Outlook, so I am guessing Mac Mail is in the same ballpark.

Office? I am an OpenOffice user, but I've used both Mac MS Office X and MS Office 2000 and 2003. I do preffer the windows version a little more, but office is office, its all the same.

Browsers, why the hell would you use that thing called IE anyway? its slow, buggy, and has security holes than swiss cheese. Just get Firefox and your problems are solved.

I would agree cleartype is better than anti-aliasing in mac, but only by so much. a typical person would have a hard time telling the 2 appart


and whatever you do..STAY AWAY FROM DELL.

Thunderbird will do newsgroups. Also there are a few dedicated newsgroup readers like Unison.

I prefer Mail. Entourage seemed like a huge piece of bloatware to me.

Office for Mac is just more streamlined than Office for PC. It seems to work a lot better. They rewrote Office for Mac from the ground up so it's very optimised and offers full compatibility with Office for PC.

My PowerBook had a video card problem that didn't show up in Panther except under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, however, due to the way Tiger uses the video card the problem became constant. I posted about it in my "good tech support" thread.

And let me take a minute to say this: HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA abf, you've been pwned!

CorelDraw 12 isn't available for Mac it seems, though previous versions were.

Look into Apple's "Pages" programme for simple things such as fliers. Pages is part of iWork which comes with Keynote. Keynote blows PowerPoint out of the water.

It's been an age since I've used any version of CorelDraw so I can't vouch for feature parity, but there's a pretty neat vector-based drawing app for MacOSX called Expression. It's owned by Microsoft, but was developed by other companies and bought up. If you can believe it, is currently offered free for download since M$ seems to have no idea what to do with that particular acquisition.

Also, as KaKaze says, there's Apple's Pages, which was designed to be an easy flier and other simple layout app. All depends on what you want out of your fliers.

I'd definitely first look all available alternatives before going to emulation mode though. On one hand emulation is a technical marvel, but on the other you don't want run anything in that kind of emulation if you can possibly avoid it.

Oh, I'd forgotten about Expression. I downloaded it once a while ago but never used it. I should get it again and give it a try. Too used to Illustrator, however...

I'm not a former PC user, but I've still a word or two I think might be helpful.

I can invert this question and answer it since it was about three years ago, after being exclusively a Mac user for about fifteen years, that I started dirtying my hands with Windows in order to help my friends, since dedicated Appler or not, I was the most technically proficient and confident. I spent lots of time cussing at the hassles of installing and uninstalling things in Windows, as well as Windows itself, but far as just the daily use end, it took no time at all for me to get along in Windows 98 and later Windows 2000. I wasn't pleased, but I could do what I needed to.

So, given that MacOSX generally causes <i>less</i> brain damage than Windows, as a grown human being you shouldn't have any serious problems if you let go of the phobias. You're only wanting to use the computer, not build it from scratch.

Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what software you need/want. Any new Mac comes with a bundle of software that does quite a lot, there's a wealth of free, totally Cocoa programmed MacOSX native software requiring no command line knowledge available and a number of very useful commercial programs have become quite affordable.

I used to think Virtual PC was really neat. In a way, I still do as a technical thing, but the last version I owned was 3.0 because since then, I haven't really felt the need for it as the advent of OSX opened up so many software doors there's really no Windows software I feel the need to have on tap like that.

Funny all the apps you've read that run better on a PC I find better on the Mac and I use both Mac and PC.
Mail and Safari are much improved in OS X 10.4 (Tiger), I way prefer both Safari and Mail to IE and Outlook on the PC which I have on my Thinkpads. Safari is wicked fast with Tiger and the Mail app is much cleaner and nicer than Outlook. I don't even use IE on my PC's only Firefox which you can also use on the Mac if you so choose.
Microsoft Office 2004 Mac edition is a better program than Office 2003 is for the PC, I think even Microsoft says so. As far as the anti aliasing I can't say because both my Macs and PC's have great displays and I don't use ClearType on the PC. I have no problems with either.

dell pdas are great...best deal for the money. that desktop is old (has p1 mmx in it) so its built like a brick. new dell computers, especially laptops are of very poor quality.

i am not worried about my pda quality because i have 3 year adp + 3 year warranty