Windows Refugees – Welcome to the Happy Mac!
I have several colleagues who are making the big switch from Windows to Mac recently, and it got me thinking about when I made the move from my PC world back to Mac.
You know you wish you had one.
I had a Mac Classic in college – that baby was a powerhouse! It wasn’t my first brush with an Apple – my Dad had an Apple IIe with the sexy green and white screen and dual 5.25 floppies, but this was my own first Apple. Check out these amazing specs:
- A roomy black and white 9″ screen
- no modem because well…no internet.
- 1 whopping meg of RAM – slow down speed racer!
- 40 meg hard drive…yes MEG! – that wouldn’t even hold my Mail app now, let alone run an OS.
- single 3.5″ floppy drive – what’s USB?
- Processor speed: 8 mhz – you heard me right 8!
- This new thing called a mouse – interesting gadget
And all this power and speed was mine for the student super discount price of $1,700. You betcha. Now the great news was, well nothing was compatible with the “business” world. I had a word processor and Aldus Pagemaker. Excel? Well, no but the Mac didn’t worry its simple self with numbers and such. It was a creative type. And I loved him for it. Every time I woke him up, he greeted me with his Happy Mac smile.
And I made lots of fun things on that little guy. But the only way to get that stuff out of my machine at the time was my smokin hot dot matrix printer, faithful Okidata, or truck my disks down to Kinkos and pray that they had a machine that worked with what I had, then pray again that their printer wasn’t broken, then hope the output was even close to what was on the screen, and then pay through the nose for some laser prints.
But at work, I spent years in the PC world, first working with DOS, Windows 3.1, and I was a Windows girl through to XP where I had a good handle on how things were supposed to work. I got to a point where I’d say my Dell and I had an understanding – we learned to co-exist. I knew his noises, his quirks, and how to get him to do what I wanted for the most part. I can’t say we were ever a happy couple, but we stayed together for the sake of the business. He started getting angry though, passive-aggressively not handing me files when I asked for them, giving me the silent treatment, and quietly sabotaging me at the most hurtful times just to spite me.
All the while, Mac was calling to me quietly, its seeming compatibility, its charming good looks. A siren song of an easy carefree relationship. And then there were my memories of the good old Mac Classic. It was a simple creature but it made me happy. So one impetuous weekend, the temptation overtook me. I threw caution to the wind and took the plunge with a shiny new white Macbook. I never looked back. I’ve evolved from the white to the black to the mini and now to my current love, the 15″ Macbook Pro. Not too big, not too small, packed with elegant power and speed.
My 2nd Mac Love
But that first white Macbook. I remember opening the box, the perfectly crisp white box filled with elegant packaging. The plastic they use even smells like happiness. New Mac Smell. It’s probably a carefully crafted Mac conspiracy but I am a willing victim. I crave New Mac Smell.
I plugged it in, turned it on…it gave me a melodic greeting, and asked me three simple questions. It wanted to be on a first name basis, it wanted to know how people could get in touch with me via email, and it asked nicely if I had an internet connection it might be able to use. Then it was ready to get to work. I was stunned. It was too good to be true. I’d been in a lot of bad relationships in the past, and I was cautious. I don’t even want to talk about Compaq – such an abuser. But there was no need for worry – the white MacBook never let me down.
Part of what made me feel safe about the move was that I could install my trusty copy of XP on the Mac and I did so almost immediately. I added VMWare Fusion
I downloaded a few things and installed a program I decided I didn’t need after all. And I tried to uninstall it. Right click…no way to uninstall it? System preferences, no uninstall. Applications? No uninstall. Ummm, this seems like a bit of a problem. So I Googled, and Googled, and felt kind of sheepish when I found the answer after a few articles. All you have to do is drag the application to the trash can on the dock, which turns into an uninstall button when you drag an application down to it. I couldn’t figure it out because it was too easy. And my love grew.
On to virus protection. Again Google Google Google. Mac anti-virus…wow not a lot. Mac virus protection, next to nothing. And then some editorials about how Macs just don’t get viruses. There had only been three known viruses for Macs when I was looking. What? The articles I read recommended virus protection for two reasons only – you’re kind of paranoid and/or are into some unsafe practices like peer-to-peer downloads, or you want to protect your Windows buddies from getting something from you that you might be a carrier for without being infected yourself. I still fell into the paranoid category because well you just never know. So I grabbed the best option I could, Clam-Xav, and marveled that it’s free.
My MacBook Pro doesn’t have a copy of Windows. My black MacBook does but I can’t remember the last time I used it. It’s just not necessary – the Mac stuff works great with the less-fortunate PC file users. My current MacBook Pro lives in perfect harmony with its Windows brethren, though I have to admit I do catch it from time to time laughing haughtily when it notices some poor sap pulling their hair out over Vista.
In two short years of Mac bliss, I have become unofficial technical support for the other lucky Macs in my office. And the newest converts always ask me the same questions. So to pass on the Mac love, I’ll post a series newbie how-tos for the Mac. Welcome to the happy Mac family!
your computer pc pictures very funny, i enjoyed to look at your website.. especially that oldest computer