My switching Experience

Hi Guys,

I must honestly say, after purchasing my 13" Macbook Pro (Summer 2009) Model - I thought that I had just purchased:

1) The most beautiful piece of notebook that existed
2) a world of problems for myself due to software and hardware issues as well as loads of wasted time adapting to the OS

I must say though, after a week of getting all of the right software and migrating all of my files, pictures, docs, videos, etc over to the Mac... I am the happiest guy ever. Sure I could probably get things done a bit faster in Windows, but it will just take some time before I am zooming around the OS doing what I need to do with the same speed!

I love the speed of this machine, the stability, the beautifully designed OS and just everything about this machine. It was honestly the best switch that I have ever made. I've been with Windows since Win 95. I've been through 98, 98se, 2000, XP and Windows 7 RC and I am just so ecstatic with my switch.

Having said that though... I HATE both Quickbooks for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac. Most g*d aweful experience of my life having to get my Quickbooks Data migrated from Windows to Mac. Then, when I thought that everything was done I went to create an invoice and the invoice template was defaulted back the default and my pretty invoices were no more... so I got Parallels Desktop and installed Windows XP and Quickbooks for Windows. Since I only REALLY do invoicing once a month, I dont mind booting up Windows in the Virtualised OS. So that was a bit of a bummer, but hey... I "GUESS" it can be expected. I dunno.

Office 2008 for Mac. WHY for the love of G*D would Microsoft release such a piece of crap? This should be called something else. It honestly gives Microsofts only good piece of software (package) a very bad reputation. It will take getting used to the whole Word and Excel experience on Mac I guess, but one thing that I can no longer live with is Entourage for Mac. Wow... if you want to ruin your otherwise perfectly synced life... install Entourage. I was always very happy that my iPhone, OWA and Outlook (or any client I chose to use) was all perfectly in sync. I could send an email on my iphone and it was instantly in my sent items on my PC without having to hook up cables. I could add a task or calendar entry on either my PC or iPhone and things would sync up instantly everywhere on any device I had setup. Entourage 2008 took forever to get working because of it's terribly written Configuration Wizard and its stupid dialog boxes requesting information that, let's be honest, how was I supposed to know? Their terrible help section didnt help either. Along with this and the crawling speed at which it operates at (besides sending mails... this works very well) along with the fact that it keeps telling me that my Username and Password are incorrect - AFTER IT HAS BEEN ONLINE FOR 30 MINUTES, DOWNLOADED AND SENT EMAILS... ALL OF A SUDDEN MY USER AND PASS ARE WRONG???!!!??? - so you have to shut it down and open it up again, type your password in and use your mail... just to be told a random amount of time later, that your user and pass are incorrect.

Anyhow.. perhaps this is simply because MS wants you back on a PC running Windows... who will ever really know.

Big up to Apple. I love the fact that I switched and I am a proud Mac user and will be for the rest of my life.

Chris Grant

Glad to hear you're enjoying your new Mac and welcome to these forums. Please read through the "sticky" posts as they are very informative and may answer many of the questions you might have.

Most of us use both platforms and are familiar with running Windows software as well as those found in OS X. As for your comments about Quickbooks and Office 2008, it's all a matter of personal preference.

I used MS Money in Windows after having given up on anything Quicken years ago. However, I use both Office 2007 (Win) and Office 2008 (OS X) and although there are differences, I lean more toward Office 2008 than 2007. The thing I miss most about Office 2008 from 2007 is the lack of macros.

I believe once you get used to using native OS X applications and realize how easy and intuitive they are to use, your opinions will change. Again, welcome and enjoy your new machine. Take good care of it.

Regards.

Thanks for the welcome and the advise.

In all honesty I only have a problem with Entourage and its "Exchange Support" and Quickbooks' terrible support for converting from PC to Mac. Barring those two things I am more than happy.

Photoshop, Logic, Filezilla, etc... all of the programs that I use day to day I use the native Mac OSX versions and they just run beautifully.

I am glad that Outlook will be returning to Office for Mac as of Version 2010. Yay! Lets hope that the MacBU don't mess that one up. Otherwise I WILL find myself running Outlook 2007 in coherency.

Now I just need to pop in the Snow Leopard Disk that came with the MBP and do an upgrade. Hopefully it goes smoothly.

Cheerz for now.

Chris