apple cake

It's a month since I brought home a new iMac. I blogged about the initial experience here.

In the intervening weeks, along with devoting myself to house tasks, I've spent time getting familiar with the new environment. Perhaps predictably, I soon came to prefer the Mac, and there were many days I didn't turn on the Windows machine at all.

But the time for play ended last week. I have an article due at the end of the month. I needed to get the new computer installed in the 'place of honor' on my computer desk so I could actually do some work on it. In order to take down the old one, though I needed to transfer a bundle of files.

So most of my time on the computer last week was sent combing through the folders and files on my old computer, and manually converting each file I wanted to move from WordPerfect to Word. It took hours and hours!

The actual move, though, was easy. After I'd burned the files I wanted to move onto a CD, I could simply drag them into the appropriate folders on the Mac.

All the converting and moving took me till Friday morning. Then I had one more hurdle to get over -- set up our house accounts on the new computer. To do that on the old, I've used Quicken forever (as in using Quicken 3!). There is a Quicken program for Macs (Yaaay!!). And when I went to the Apple store on Friday afternoon, I was able to snafu their last copy in stock.

Saturday, then, was spent reconstructing the last month or two of our spending on Quicken 2007 for Mac. (I know there is a way to import data from an old Quicken account to a new one. But the instructions are so complicated, I decided to start fresh. Next tax year when we need to access that old information, we'll just have to get it from the old computer, which E. now inherits.)

Then on Saturday night, after all the above was done, I officially took the old system apart, and installed the new one on my computer table. I am now an official Apple user -- and don't regret making the move.

Of course I'm still learning how to do stuff on here -- and keep other stuff from happening. In that last category, for example, yesterday for no apparent reason (I must have done something to make it happen but I sure don't know what) everything on the screen (the dock, the screen picture, the tool bar at the top) began shifting around as I moved my mouse. Somehow the screen picture also got enlarged and so as I moved the mouse, sometimes the dock would disappear, or the tool bar at the top would disappear. Yikes! To remedy this, I simply restarted the computer.

Here is my list of pros and cons after using Mac for a month:

PROS:
- Reliable, fast, elegant, quiet.
- "Help" is easy to understand.
- Lots of nice features to organize photos.
- Software has been simple to load.
- Can enlarge print on screen with a keystroke.
- Love the smooth scroll ball on the mouse.

CONS:
- I still wish I had my ergonomic keyboard.
- Mouse action took some getting used to.
- Don't have the option to print a 'selection' from the internet. I must do it in two steps, e.g. copy/paste my selection into a text or Word document, then print.

The Apple store where I bought the computer offers a free class. As I come across things I can't figure out I'm making a list, which I'll try to get answered when I attend the class in late June.

I'm glad I was able to transition slowly. Looking back on the experience, aside from all the file conversion necessary, I can say it was pretty much a piece of (Apple) cake.

(Apple Cake photo from dolcitalia.net)