By
Yuval Kossovsky, ComputerWorld
November
09, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD)-
In my last article, I looked at the new
iMac G5 from a Mac user's perspective. Apple
pushes it as the kind of hardware one wouldn't
mind having in one's living room for aesthetic
reasons. My wife, the fashion maven, agrees
-- so much so that after seeing the iMac
G5, she looked at her battered but trusty
Sony Vaio and declared, "I'm ready
to switch."
The truth of the matter is that I did
get her interested in Mac OS X several
months ago when we purchased a Casio Exilim
EX-Z4U digital camera. I showed her how
to use iPhoto to organize the pictures,
and she even printed a book of our vacation.
The seeds were sown.
When
I showed her the stylish, white iMac G5
-- which was released in late August and
made available to me for review purposes
by Apple -- I told her that all of the
major applications running on her PC were
already included: Microsoft Office Test
Drive (I installed the full version of
the Office suite for her), Entourage (as
Outlook), Quicken and the Internet Explorer
Web browser. For applications that would
run only on a Windows machine, including
our "bride's mate" software,
I obtained a copy of Virtual PC 7. VPC
emulates the Windows operating system
on a Macintosh, although it runs slower.
When
I promised I could move over all of her
favorites and her e-mail without any disruption,
she was ready to go.
The
first step in the migration process was
preparing the PC data for transfer. To
migrate the user account information,
directory structure and favorites, I used
Bellevue, Wash.-based Detto
Technology's "Move2Mac"
software. It truly simplifies the migration
process with a step-by-step checklist
and a special Universal Serial Bus cable
that has a chip in it to accelerate data-transfer
speeds. Move2Mac faithfully preserved
my wife's favorites and cookies, eliminating
any need to re-register with any Web site,
including her online banking site. It
also re-created her address book and mail
settings, although we needed a different
application to migrate her mail data.
I highly suggest using Move 2 Mac for
any switcher who wants to keep his data
intact.
To
convert Microsoft Outlook e-mail to a
Mac-compatible format, we used a wonderful
utility from Little
Machines called Outlook2Mac. This
software does exactly what the name suggests,
giving you the option of exporting your
mail into any format of mail client that
exists on the Mac, including Entourage
and Apple's Mail program, which is built
into Mac OS X. Outlook2Mac also exports
your Outlook contacts into Entourage-
and Address book-compatible formats and
exports the calendar into Entourage and
iCal formats. The only problem we had
was the security in Outlook, which only
allowed scripts to run for 10 minutes
at a time without being reauthorized.
This isn't related to the Little Machines
product per se, but is something you will
need to pay attention to when performing
the export.
On
the iMac G5, we use two scripts to keep
Entourage in sync with iCal and the Address
book so that we can use iSync to keep
the data on my wife's Palm handheld and
my Nokia 6600 synced with the data on
the computer. The scripts, called "Sync
Entourage to iCal" and "Sync
Entourage to Address Book," are by
Paul Berkowitz and can be found at ScriptBuilders.net.
As
a PC user, my wife had really only one
major complaint about the Mac: The lack
of a two-button mouse. Since we were using
the Bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard,
I had to get some other form of wireless
mouse. We were unable to find a good two-button
Bluetooth mouse and finally settled on
Microsoft Corp.'s wireless IntelliMouse.
So now we have a black dongle hanging
off of the back of the otherwise pristine
iMac G5. Honestly, Apple, you need to
make a good two-, four-, or six-button
Bluetooth mouse.
By
this point, we had moved over all of my
wife's data and gotten the e-mail, calendar
and contacts up and running. We tried
to import her Quicken data, but we weren't
satisfied with the interface for the application
on the Mac side. If you've never used
Quicken on a PC, then the interface is
fine. But the application is so different
on each platform that we didn't want to
switch versions. So for this we turned
to Virtual PC 7 from Microsoft.
I've
used this product over the years, and
each iteration gets better. VPC 6 was
actually usable -- albeit slow. VPC 7,
by contrast, is actually pretty fast on
my iMac G5, and even though the iMac has
only 256MB of RAM, VPC runs as if it's
on a Pentium III PC. On my PowerBook G4,
which has 2GB of RAM, I get the same performance.
Considering that VPC 7 is now tweaked
to take advantage of the faster G5 chip,
I believe that with 500MB or more of memory,
you wouldn't notice VPC as an emulation
program except for when running multimedia
applications. We installed Quicken on
my wife's VPC "disk," and everything
worked the way we hoped.
I
can't say enough about the ease of migration
from a PC when using the above-mentioned
tools. And if you have applications that
only work in Windows, remember that VPC
7 with Windows XP is a solid choice. Just
make sure you have enough RAM in your
machine, and it will perform as expected.
Next
time, I'll be looking at enterprise-quality
storage-area network backup for Mac OS
X.
Did
I miss something? Want to ask me something?
Send your questions, comments and curses
to y.Kossovsky@ieee.org.
