Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 5

Howdy, Folks;

The transition is going well. If you're willing to learn the interface differences between Windows and the Mac, go for it.

As mentioned before, I am running Vista Business in a virtual machine (VM) under Mac OS X. Into that VM I installed my primary Windows programs, including my cad software. (Note to anybody interested: I did this legally in every case, either by removing the software from the old machine, or because the license allows it. Yes, you do have to have a license for software running in a virtual machine.) It works flawlessly, either in a window on the OS X desktop or full screen. When not running full screen, copy and paste between Vista apps and OS X apps works just the way it should. Running the cad software, I noticed the view translations are a bit slower than on my other machine, and I expected this because of the lack of hardware video acceleration in the VM; but it is still perfectly usable, and the speed of the program over-all is just as fast as it was on my old machine, maybe faster. Ultimate usability of the cad software remains to be seen, however - I haven't had the opportunity to load any really big assemblies into it. Running my PIM, Info Select in Vista in a window on OS X works just as well as running it directly on the desktop of Vista. Also note that the Parallels VM has the ability to pause the VM - this basically puts Vista and everything running in it on hold, and removes it from the running processes of OS X - instantly.

One major feature to notice about Parallels Desktop - you can back up the entire virtual machine to disk. If something gets screwed up in your VM, you can restore your backup and be back on line in 10-15 minutes. So build your virtual machine, get it just like you want it, and back it up. Then back your data up daily, elsewhere.

Running the Mac's activity monitor shows that even when running the cad program in the VM - Vista, I never maxed out the CPU or memory. This shows that the machine has the resources to do the job.

As far as Vista itself goes, well, it seems pretty smooth. I installed the shareware version of Eset's NOD32 antivirus (recommended), since I'm not willing to run Windows connected to the internet without antivirus protection. Vista has a nice desktop, and I like what they've done with Windows Explorer. The feeling I get, though, is that Vista is almost a knock-off of Mac OS X. Most (maybe all) of the interesting new features in Vista have been in OS X for over a year, although all of it is new to me. I do not see as many security pop-ups as I expected to from what I had read before. Vista did better than XP at finding the XP network, but it wasn't as simple as it was on the Mac. The short of it is, Vista is better than XP (based on a few hours of fooling around with it) but so far as I can see, there's nothing in Vista that wasn't already in Mac OS X. And OS X is about to get a new version, with several new features, in the next couple of months.

Am I being biased about this? Possibly. I've been beating my head against Windows for a long, long time - and I'm ready for a rest. So far, the Mac has performed flawlessly, and the bells and whistles are awesome. It's pretty much (at present) the same bells and whistles that are in Vista. But on every previous version of Windows, it wasn't uncommon for me to spend an hour a day trying to make it do what i needed it to do. So far, with Mac OS X, that hasn't happened at all. The only time-consuming part of making this transition has been learning the differences in the interface.

One thing that took some getting used to on the Mac is mounting and dismounting drives. You don't just eject a disk at the drive - you eject it from the desktop by dragging it to the trashcan (and there are a couple of other ways to do this). One thing I really, really like is that software you install comes as a disk image file. Once installed, software written for the Mac is usually all stored in a single file- which acts as a disk image. On Windows, an installed application may have hundreds to thousands of files associated with it, some in the Windows directory, some in the application directory, some who knows where? On the Mac, the entire application is, in most cases, in one file. To uninstall the program, you drop it in the trash. Elegant. The exception to all this, of course, is Windows programs that have been ported to the Mac. Which I am avoiding whenever possible.

Another thing I noticed is that a lot of good Mac software is relatively inexpensive. A good example of this - the Parallel Desktop for Mac, which is the VM software - $79. Go price VMware Workstation, or whatever the current version is. Quite a bit more, and doesn't work as well. Info Select for Windows costs $250 for a new license. On the Mac side, Omni Outliner is in the box, but you can buy the Pro version for $79. The excellent Circus Ponies Notebook program sells for $50. This is nice. And I haven't needed to purchase Zone Alarm, or antivirus software, and spam turns out to be a non-event.

So, things are going well, still. And I'm still impressed by the Mac, and OS X.

Y'all have a nice day!
-Pop