Week 2: Ditching The PC--Moving To Mac

Ok I'm a bit tardy, I'm really at Week 3 but who cares right? The question is, does it work for what I would call "normal everyday business"? Here's the previous week's events of note.

Day 8:
I needed to load some work specific software, one of note was a Nortel VPN client. I loaded the CD, followed the prompts and had no issues during install. I loaded my company software and things were still working fine. However, when I tried to launch this software after install I could not connect to the Nortel VPN. I did not have enough time to diagnose that day so I addressed on Day 9. Strike 2.

Day 9:
I'm still having connection issues on the Nortel VPN, and now am questioning the processor of the Mac being compatible with this VPN. I try to find a customer support number for VMWare to verify.

Day 10:
I'm unimpressed with the website help at VMWare site, you get 30 days of e-mail support for free but I can't find much else. There's no support number to speak of, just e-mail and a few thin knowledge base articles.

Day 11:
I had an epiphany...Maybe restarting the PC virtual machine might be a good thing to do. I give it a whirl, and what do you know? It works! I've got things up and working with the VPN. I guess the old fashioned shut down and restart was in order. I had shut down and restarted the Mac on day 9 and 10, but when using VMWare Fusion it takes a "snapshot" of the virtual machine--not really shutting it down and restarting.

Day 12:
Everything is working great! I very pleased with the integration. I can drag and drop everything from Mac to PC and the the different views are very cool. I have the ability to have a split screen view of each OS, have a "Unity view" which puts the Windows program on the Mac Desktop, or I can even have a full screen view of Windows XP.

Day 13:
Still pleased, however, I don't have any sound coming off the Windows XP side and my darn keyboard has lost some critical shortcuts like Ctrl + C or Ctrl to individual files on my Windows side. For example if I want to delete certain files not in chronological order, I can't do it. Strike 2 1/2.

Day 14:
This is fantastic! Windows XP has never worked this good on any PC I've ever had. I'm planning to Google the problems I've got with the keyboard and sound, I'm sure this is a matter of setting that I've not been able to locate.

In summary, this was a much easier transition that I ever imagined. It's very nice to be able to switch back and forth between OS' especially since I use the Adobe CS3 suite on the Mac side. Even if you have no interest in specific Mac application, running XP on there is a real treat. Everything works the same as it does on the PC. I can't find any reason not to recommend the move, it's quite simple even for the novice (like me). I'll post anything of relevancy as they come up.