thinking about making ‘the change’

don’t talk to me about advantages etc, i’m not interested.

All i want to know is how easy it’s going to be to transfer the likes of Outlook PST files over to mac (probably running office anyway)

Also how is lightroom at transferring photo libraries?

I will be dual booting it anyway to ease the process of getting used to software (and using packages i have bought for PC) and to enable use of tracklogs.

will firefox transfer passwords/history/cookies etc cross platform?

thanks for any tips

Dont dual boot, install parallels or similar virtual setups.

The rest, as straight forward as migrating to another windows machine although regards Outlook I find it easier to migrate through the likes as Gmail as an intermediary (and a handy backup). Apple mail / mobile me is fairly basic especially regards searches etc so gmail / outlook is preferred.

Regards Lightroom, the export as catalogue (ensure you include negatives and preview files) is the easiest way. Use a portable drive formatted as FAT32 so can be recognised at both ends.

The other option is Aperture which is available on the App store for < £50.

The latest version of Firefox will sync over the air (or at least, it claims to, I’ve not tried it myself).

ta

not come across parallels, all the mac geeks I work with just dual boot, i’ll look into it

Parallels = virtualisation software. Run Windows on top of OSX.

how’s that with memory/processor intensive applications? Do you suffer on system resources?

boot camp / dual boot works ok, but lacks control of some items (ie fans / graphics cards etc) Also its a bit of a pain having to reboot, and work in isolation of all your files etc (unless you run MACdrive or similar).

Parallels basically integrates a Windows session into your Mac, running in coherence mode appears as a taskbar item and can set security to allow full access between both platforms. Also backs up as part of the time-machine.

I also find it slightly quicker for some applications, and an excellent option to utilise certain software (ie CS packages) until you can get the apple equivalents. You can allocate system resources as part of the install / setup (ie cores / memory etc)

thanks, that’s good to know

Depends on the power of the machine.

I use virtualisation quite extensively, and it’s surprising what you can get away with (acceptable performance level).

For example : one virtualisation host (here at work) is only a dual-CPU 2.8 Xeon (from 2006…ish… so 1MB L2 cache… and vastly underpowered by todays CPUs) with 6GB RAM and 2 x 1TB drives mirrored.

It has 8 Win XPs on top of it (doing various things) with more than acceptable performance.

On my desktop here (Intel Pentium D… 3.0GHz + 8GB RAM + 1TB disk), I am running OSX (2GB), XP (512MB), Win 7 (2GB) AND Server 2003 (2GB) all at the same time…

The host (physical PC) is Win 7 Pro x64.

Hardware these days IMHO is miles ahead of the software in terms of progression (OS in particular).

cool

probably be i7 with at least 4Gb so should be no probs

Parallels is superb, I run my old windows PC inside my Macbook – that way I have ultimately backward compatibility….

I might have missed something here but,

I thought the OP was looking at running OSX on a PC, and (some of) the advice seems to be more appropriate for running Windows on a Mac?

cougar – switching from a PC laptop to a MBP

thinking about making ‘the change’

I assumed that was switching over to Mac hardware as well as software ? If not then ignore all the above !

If “the change” means surgical intervention and female dress … then he’ll probably switch to linux anyway 🙂

switching from a PC laptop to a MBP

Ah, right. My bad then, just checking. (-:

I’ve got a Switch-to-Mac cable here that you can have for the cost of postage. I bought it naively thinking that it would allow 2 way transfer of data, but of course no one in in the history of the world has ever wanted to send info from a Mac to a PC. Except me, natch.

Outlook for Mac has a PST importer, not sure how good it is though.

I’d be tempted to back up to Google calendar and contacts (in gmail) before starting the progress.