Moving Computers

I'm in the middle of moving from a PC laptop to a new MacBook Pro. I've used both operating systems over the course of my computer lifetime, but it's been a good four years or so since I had a Mac laptop, and a good decade at least since my main computer was a Mac. It's always an interesting experience--going to a new everything. It helps me remember what it's like for people who don't use computers all the time. Simple tasks like opening files, knowing where your default save location is, learning the new keyboard shortcuts--it's all new.

I've only had the computer for a day so far, but there have already been some panic moments. I forget how PC-centric the computer world can be. I'm used to just being able to run any program I feel like. I had some favorite free programs on the PC that suddenly didn't work for me anymore. They were PC only. But I've been able to do some mad Googling (and inquiring of friends), and everything's getting ironed out, bit by bit.

(Really, I'm not sure how I functioned in pre-internet times. If I had a question then, I had to rely on phone calls (and good luck finding the phone number sometimes) or the advice of technicians. I remember having to take my computer in for fixes for things that these days I could just search for a solution on my own.)

I will say that one thing I've really appreciated is how easy Chrome makes it to transfer everything between computers. I logged into Chrome on my old laptop, told it to sync everything with my Google account, then logged into Chrome on my new laptop, synced, and now all my bookmarks, my history, my favorites, my add-ons--they're all there. That was pretty slick.

Anyway--just wanted to share some of the process with you. I'm loving the new machine. (Why did I switch operating systems? Partly because I wanted to bone up on my Mac skills, partly because I felt like I'd bought in to so much of the rest of the Mac machinery (iPad, AppleTV, iPod, etc.) that it just made sense to have my laptop follow suit.) We'll see how the rest of the transition goes over the next week or so as I find other things that I don't realize now that I need to discover workarounds for. There's always something.