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In June 2006 I wrote here how I wanted one of the new Intel iMac's, well some 8 months later I have finally ordered one! At the time of writing this part of this blog entry I have yet to receive it but have just been told that it should arrive on or before the 20th February so I have been getting myself prepared for the big switch over.
I thought it might be of interest to others to see how I cope with the 'big switch' so I shall be detailing my progress in this blog. The first thing I should point out is that I have used PC's ever since Windows 3.1 and I pretty much know them inside out having built and upgraded dozens whilst in that time I have only used a Mac for a few seconds here and there so I am a total newbie to Mac's. I know nothing.
So Why Switch?
If I've used PC's for so long why would I want to change over to a Mac now? Firstly let me say that I'm not going to start bashing PC's, PC's are good, very good and can do everything a Mac can do it's just that in my opinion I now think Mac's do it better. It would take pages and pages to fully explain my reasons so instead it is easier just to list some of the things that annoy me about PC's.
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Viruses. When I first started using PC's viruses weren't really a problem but that was before the Internet. Up till then all you had to do was worry about what may be lurking on a floppy disc but the Internet saw a huge influx in the number of viruses to the extent that last year there were 114,000 known viruses for the PC. So every year you have to pay to renew your virus subscriptions, unless you want to trust a free one, and constantly download the latest definitions.
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Constant Notifications. It seems that whenever you do anything on a PC it pops up a bubble saying "ooh I've just found some hardware", "umm, I can't connect to that drive", "erm, there's another security update for you to download". Why can't it just do it in the first place without needing a pat on the back to have done something that I would have expected it to do in the first place?
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Crashes. Now I know there are lots of people out there that will say "but my PC never crashes" but whilst this is true it is the exception rather than the rule. My desktop PC is actually pretty reliable but my laptop and one of my desktops at work are constantly falling over for no apparent reason.
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Driver conflicts. Windows XP was supposed to be the answer to all our driver problems but it really hasn't turned out that way. Yes a lot of hardware is natively supported and so only needs a driver for enhanced features and yes there are generally less driver conflicts than previous versions of Windows but other than for Microsoft hardware products when was the last time you DIDN'T get a missing Digital Signature warning when installing a driver for a new piece of hardware?
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Windows. I don't really have anything against Windows XP, I mean it's okay it does it job reasonably well and it doesn't look too bad if a little dated, but I really don't understand Windows Vista. How can Microsoft justify their prices?
Windows Vista Basic Full Version £180
Windows Vista Premium Full Version £211
Windows Vista Ultimate Full Version £351
All supposedly the same program but with various features switched off depending on basically what you want to pay for and this is without mentioning the Business Editions.
Then you have Mac
OSX Tiger £89 and that has everything enabled. Half the price of the cheapest 'all turned off' version of Vista!
Microsoft are proudly showing off all the new looks of Vista but fail to mention that much of these improvements have been directly copied from OSX and are things that Apple have been doing for ages and doing better. All of this goes without mentioning that, although perhaps to be expected with a new operating system, there are numerous hardware and driver problems with many third party manufacturers being caught out and not having drivers ready for Vista's release and of course many older pieces of hardware won't work in Vista at all. Vista itself is supposedly much more powerful and secure than previous versions of Windows but even though it requires some of the latest and fastest processors with lots of RAM actually runs slower than Windows XP would on the same hardware. As for being more powerful, I thought it was quite funny when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, was interviewed by the BBC for the Money Program about Windows Vista and one of the first things he 'showed off' was the new 3D chess game in Vista! Oh goody, that's just what I want after spending £351 on what is supposed to be a state of the art operating system, a game of chess! As for the improved security only time will tell but already there appears to be many opinions out there that Vista isn't as secure as Microsoft would have us believe. -
In the past I used to quite enjoy problem solving PC's, taking them apart, upgrading them, running diagnostic and test bench software on them, cleaning the registry, tweaking the start-up routines etc etc but now all I want to do is to use a computer for the job I bought it for in the first place and not to have to spend hours every month doing preventative maintenance.
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Ultimately the main reason for buying a Mac now was because I needed to replace my old PC and with Vista just being released it meant that it would be prudent to buy/build a system powerful enough to run that but would ultimately still be left with many of the problems synonymous with Windows.
No doubt in the future I will have a PC that runs Vista but I'm certainly in no hurry to use it. This Apple advert pretty much sums up how I feel about Vista and made me laugh out loud.
Choosing a Mac
The choice of Mac for me was actually quite simple; it was an Intel iMac all the way. This was partly due to budget, there was no way I could afford a Mac Pro and a Mini Mac wasn't going to be powerful enough so then it was just a case of choosing the spec. The fastest CPU for the 17" iMac is 2Ghz which was a little slower than I would really like and I also felt that the screen was a little too small for photo editing. The 24" iMac can have a 2.16Ghz or a 2.33Ghz CPU but it's big, really big. For some people this might be ideal but for me it was a bit too big for my needs not to mention more expensive so in the end I went for a 20" iMac with the 2.33Ghz CPU. As standard this iMac comes with 1GB of RAM but I upgraded this to 2GB as Photoshop and Bridge are RAM hungry applications. I also decided to upgrade the graphics card from 128MB to 256MB as the extra RAM might help a bit with Photoshop and video work. I decided 
to stick with a 250GB internal drive as I also ordered the Iomega 640GB Ultramax with Dual USB 2 & Firewire interface and hub. This combination will give me ample room for programs on the system drive with high resolution photos and other documents etc on the external drive. As the Iomega drive also has a USB and Firewire hub built into it, it also means that I can add more drives to my system in the future without using up another USB port on the iMac itself.
On my PC I use a set of 4.1 cube speakers from Creative which give pretty good sound quality
but these are several years old now and are showing their age and I have never actually needed anything above 2.1 anyway so although I could have used them on the iMac I decided to treat myself to a pair of JBL Creature II's in white which fit in very well with the iMac design and perhaps most importantly have great sound quality and a very useful "capacitance touch" volume control which also remembers your last volume setting.
As for where to buy it all from, I got quoted from Jigsaw24 and Cancom but found I got the best deal by ordering from Apple direct who gave me a number of discounts on everything I ordered.
Making The Switch
The first thing I had to do in order to make the switch from PC's to Mac's was to backup all my data. There are several ways of doing this, one is just to use multiple CD's/DVD's but in my case I had a few hundred gigs of data to backup so this wasn't an option. There is also a program called Move2Mac which comes with a special USB cable allowing you to copy data between your PC and Mac which I did consider but as I already had an external USB hard drive I decided to save my money and just use this as that way I would have a backup of all my data anyway. Backing up my data such as MS Office documents, photos, MP3's etc was simply a case of copying them to the drive and just organising them into Photos, Music & Documents folders. OSX Tiger can read FAT32 and NTFS partitions (although it can only write to FAT32) and as I had a few files that were over 2GB I thought it would be best to keep the drive as NTFS. Internet Explorer is no longer produced for the Mac so I needed a way to get them from IE7 on the PC to Safari on the Mac. Fortunately this is simply a case of exporting them as an .html file from within Internet Explorer, just click and hold on the Add To Favourites button and select Import and Export.
E-mails are potentially more of a problem as although Office is now available on the Mac Outlook has been replaced with Entourage which isn't compatible with the .pst files that Outlook uses. Apple and Microsoft give detailed guides to a way of getting your e-mails from a PC to a Mac which involves setting up an IMAP server and then effectively e-mailing yourself all your e-mails all over again except that the IMAP settings mean it should preserve the original senders details and sent dates. However that seemed like a hell of a lot of work and hassle to me so instead I bought O2M for $10 which quickly converts all e-mails and attachments along with your contacts and calendar into formats that can be read and imported by a number of Mac e-mail clients.
Software
Software was potentially more of a problem as I already had spent a small fortune on PC versions of expensive applications like Photoshop, Office and Studio 8. Fortunately Adobe let me change my Windows license for Photoshop into a Mac one for just a few pounds but obviously I had to uninstall my Windows copy and destroy it. Office wasn't as simple as the version I had on my desktop was more recent version than that on my laptop so I decided to keep my Windows version and upgrade my laptop and just buy Mac Office 2004 for the iMac.
Adobe were happy for me to allow me to change my Photoshop license so it's possible that they would also allow me to do the same with Studio 8 but as I do most of my web designing on my commute to work and back on my laptop I decided to keep my PC license and give iWeb a go on the Mac. I can always upgrade to something better if need be.
One of my favourite PC applications is Nero 7 which I think is the best CD/DVD burning package on the market. Sadly this isn't available for the Mac and so I'm faced with having to buy Toast 8 Titanium instead. Due to the cost of this program, £70, I've decided to try out the CD/DVD burning facilities of OSX first and see how I get on.
Fortunately I'm not a big fan of using plug-ins in Photoshop and really the only 3rd party plug-in I use is Neat Image to remove noise. Unfortunately Neat Image wouldn't let me switch my PC license to a Mac one so I'm going to have to buy this again but at $60 for the Mac version it's actually cheaper than the PC version was.
Everything else I use on the PC like FTP programs, and programs to convert DVD's to MPEG-4 from playback on my PSP are all available for the Mac either as freeware or for just a few pounds or are part of iLife that comes with the iMac.
All I have to do now is wait for Apple to deliver my new iMac in a weeks time!
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