I'm away on vacation, but I wanted to pop in to give you a little update on the adventures I've been having switching from a PC to a Mac. Because I know that Apple wants you all to think that it's a seamless transition, and that Macs can do anything a PC can.
Well, they can't.
Not easily, at least. Yes, you can buy dualboot and a Windows license, and then you literally can do anything a PC can do, since you're running Windows. (Although I'd argue in that case, why didn't you just buy a PC. They're cheaper, you know . . .) And for security reasons, the university didn't want me dualbooting, so that was out. OSX or bust, baby.
The big pains have been finding new software that will run some of the open source stuff I did on PC. As a PC user, you get used to being able to download any old program and use it--you're using the platform used by the bulk of the world, after all. Programs get built for it all the time. But if the software's going to run either on PC or Mac, PC is the hands down favorite. So I had to come up with workarounds for that.
I've also discovered that I need to reformat my external hard drive, if I want to be able to write to it from my Mac. It's set up for PCs, and that doesn't work on the Mac side of things. If it were a smaller hard drive, it wouldn't be a big deal, but I've got 400+ GB of stuff on that drive . . .
Still need to figure out what I'm going to do about that. I'll work on that when I get back from vacation . . .
Printing is different, Word and Excel have strange dissimilarities . . . It ain't all peaches and cream.
That said, I'm still enjoying the Mac, and I'm still glad I made the switch--if for nothing more than reminding myself how things work on this side of the computer divide. As a techie, I get used to doing anything I want on computers, easily. It's good to remember how hard things can be sometimes, when something you think will be really easy turns out to be very difficult.
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