Sunday, August 01, 2010

Me and Mac

The hard drive on my old PC has been teetering on the brink of destruction for weeks now and it finally got to the point where I could no longer ignore its creakiness and reluctance to crank up for another day's work.  I knew something had to be done but I was finding it hard to pull the trigger on buying a replacement PC for the sick one because, over the years, I have come to believe that planned obsolescence of PCs is all a big plot to force me to buy replacement software every few years.  Bill Gates and company always manage to kill some of my favorite software when they come out with a new version of the Windows operating system.  The other software companies seem to have little incentive to offer the fixes that would make their older versions compatible with "Ultimate Windows" because, of course, they would rather have the customer return to buy the version that does work with Ultimate Windows or next year's Best Windows Ever.

Well, I refuse to play that game anymore.  Instead, I ponied up for my first iMac yesterday afternoon.  And now I'm faced with the huge task of moving all my old files over to the iMac so that it will do all the things I need it to do.  It is a relatively easy process, I find, to move things over to the Mac from my backup drives; the kicker is getting them to open up in the iMac software.  But even though this is my first ever exposure to working on an iMac, I continue to make steady progress - although I did have to make a run to Barnes & Noble this morning to find an illustrated user's manual that could explain a few of the things that had me stumped.

So far, I have only destroyed one thing - well, at least, so far as I can tell.  Somehow, I managed to lose everything in the inbox of my main email account, the one tied here to Book Chase, in fact.  I remember there were close to 70 emails in that box, so I apologize if I've deleted anything that required me to respond to any email from here.  I'm still hoping I'll find the inbox sitting safely in some snug little corner of Mac's big file room but, so far, that hasn't happened.

All of this computer time has limited both my reading and my posting this weekend - and I'm starting to wish I had made the switch a year ago when I first considered it because this is a snazzy machine, and I'm loving it already.  I suspect that this time-challenge will last for another few days, though, so bear with me as I struggle to get all the way back to square one again.  What is it they say about the journey again?

8 comments:

  1. Once you get situated you will love it. Congrats on the new baby! I couldn't live without mine.

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  2. Kayo, I'm really beginning to love this thing as I feel a little more comfortable with it each time out. I was a bit surprised at how different the commands are...and how similar in some ways. All in all, I figure I'm only about 30% fluent in Mac at the moment.

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  3. Hi Sam. I haven't commented in a long time but I have still been reading your post. I just switched from a Dell to a MacBook Pro. IY YI YI! I am so lost. I haven't had time to sit down and learn it yet. I am taking it tomorrow to the Apple store and letting them tranfer everything for me. I love my IPod Touch so I know that I will love my Mac. Glad that you are enjoying yours.

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  4. Hi, Melanie...good to hear from you again. It's been too long.

    I'm finding that it will, indeed, take a lot of patience to figure this thing out. But, I'm getting a little closer every day and now I'm about 40% trained, I think. I managed to get my Sony Reader to work and download on/from the Mac yesterday and today I found some software that will let me open up the videos from the my video camera. So I'm getting there...slowly.

    Don't give up. It's all pretty snazzy once you begin to learn how it works.

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  5. Thanks Sam. I bought the 15 in. MacBook Pro but then I decided to get the 13 in. because I can make the font bigger so I couldn't stomach the $600 for 2 inches. It leaves me some money for another toy. I did get Apple to transfer all my data from my Dell and tomorrow I go for some one on one time. I really need that. Did you get a desktop or a laptop? I also got a Kindle about a month ago and I am in LOVE!

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  6. I got the 21-inch desktop, Melanie. It is really cool looking and I'm starting to love it...just need to get some software now to do the things I was doing on the old PC.

    Sounds like you're really going high-tech. It's addictive, isn't it?

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  7. Are you going to run Windows on your Mac? I thought about running some things on mine. I really need windows live writer to blog in. It is so much easier than blogger. I was just wondering what you were going to use.

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  8. I planned to run Windows, even almost bought Parallels software to do that - then I found out I would need the original Windows discs from my PC in order to make it all work. I can't remember the last time I bought a PC and received Windows discs...so that idea went out the window, pun intended. I would have to buy Windows, plus Parallels at a cost of about $400 and it's just not worth that. I HATE Microsoft.

    I bought iWorks when I bought the iMac and it works pretty well as a word processor and spreadsheet app. I can open Word and Excel work in this software and can even modify it. I can't save it as Word or Excel, though, only in iWorks. But it works fine for what I want to do.

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I always love hearing from you guys...that's what keeps me book-blogging. Thanks for stopping by.