Now if you’ll excuse me I have to try and balance this pitcher of water over my PC tower.

I do love LOGMEIN.COM to help Mom out as needed. It’s free, and absolutely fantastic. Apparently, it will work for both Windows and Mac as well (if we ever upgrade Mom to a MAC).

I agree about the TCO comment above: You pay more for a Mac, but you get a fantastic operating system (FreeBSD is a few keys away), and the Macs’ build quality is excellent. Don’t compare a MacBook Pro to a cheap Dell laptop, compare it to a good ThinkPad or similar.

I have to recommend Quicksilver, the best app launcher/etc I’ve seen. The only icons in my dock are the running apps, and I have quick and easy access to everything: Apps, documents, contacts, etc.

I initially went with a Boot Camp installation that Fusion 2 then read and made some modifications to (like installing VMWare Tools), just in case I needed to boot natively in XP from time to time. Nice solution but over time, the ability to revert to a version of the Windows installation that worked before some software update (presumably) or other weirdness torpedoed the OS proved irresistible; that easy snapshot feature isn’t possible when Fusion is using your Boot Camp partition so I scrapped BC entirely and went with a regular file-as-hard-drive setup. (Creating and destroying the NTFS Boot Camp partition on the Mac does not destroy data on your HFS+ partition so it’s something you can experiment with; the tedium of installing XP from an SP1-version CD and applying all its updates is beyond my ability to describe but you’ll know all about that side of things already.)

So traded my G5 iMac purchased used two years ago in
on a still fresh in the box 24″ iMac some months ago.

First of all it is a step up to an Intel chip, which means many advantages.
I use Airport Extreme with one exception.

Use somebody else’s two terabyte hard drive for backup.
My choice, didn’t know of the problems with the inbuilt system
until after.

And because have had good success with warranty repair
on my still functioning G4 iBook purchased the extended warranty for
a reduced price. Will keep the iBook until it dies, although
pundits tell me that could be the next millenium; the last built
G4 iBooks were built very well.

The Microslop Prehistoric Computer stand alone system has
been consigned to the electronics recycler; purchased a two year old
MS based laptop (for $100.00) which will receive Windoze 7
if and when I get round to it. Some amateur radio
programs require a Microslop based environment, sadly.

And I don’t believe one shold mix operating systems
even if it is possible. One per machine, please.

I am paranoid about backups, as I beta test a lot of products and have blowups, along with hard disk failures from time to time.

I have a 2 TB external hard disk backup and have it partitioned for TimeMachine and SuperDuper. I run time machine periodically during the day when I am tethered to the backup disk. SuperDuper runs automatically each night and is bootable.

I aso have a SuperDuper backup on a portable hard disk for on-the-road daily backups. Again, this disk is bootable. I back up this disk each night on the road. When not on travel, I once a week back up this hard disk as well.

Ina

I am awaiting delivery of 2 Windows 7 laptops, one for my husband and the other for my best friend. I dread the thought of having to configure them but both people are computer luddites and will never convert to the Mac.

I also transferred my Photoshop license to the Mac on a one-time convert basis, and Lightroom allows installation on both Window and Mac computers. The only difference I note is that I am working on a far better screen on the MacBook Pro than any Windows computer I have used. And of course all your Plug-ins are a delight on the Mac Lightroom

I was originally going to use Entourage on the Mac for my mail, contacts and Calendar, but found Entourage much more crippled than Outlook. Address and Calendar ported easily iCal and Address Book. I found a cheapee converter for my mail messages and have been able to configure all in a manner similar to that I used in Outlook.

Ina

1) until Apple releases a mini display port to dual link DVI adapter that actually works, the mac pro is the only thing that supports a 30″ display. I happen to know that you don’t have a 2560×1600 display, so this probably doesn’t concern you.

2) You might check out EFI-X — I am running OSX 10.5.8 on PC hardware. I pieced together a setup based on a Q6600 (quad 2.4GHz) for less than $1000 including the EFI-X dongle. http://www.efi-x.com. No Snow Leopard support last I looked, but it is promised for owners of v1.1. I have both the EFI-X box and an 8 core early 2008 Mac Pro, and the most of the time the two systems behave similarly.

(yah, their website sucks, but basically the EFI-X is a USB dongle that boots and loads an EFI layer, which then boots vanilla OSX install media or installs)

Re: remote desktop… My mother has been benefiting from that form of IT support for a long time now (using LogMeIn, since it easily deals with firewalls and whatnot.) It is fantastic. What I meant about not being able to learn from friends was: she misses out on the little bits of computer knowledge you get from watching someone else do something at work. Things she doesn’t know to ask. “Oh, I didn’t even know you could do that…” is a common refrain whenever she gets a chance to see me using the machine.

Apps: Google’s QuickSearchBox or Quicksilver are must haves (Launchy is nice for those folks stuck with Windows.) Once you use them you will be hooked.

Re: bad reviews… “You are doing it wrong” is usually what I think when I see people posting a long litany of problems with something that seems to work for me. OSX is hardly idiot-proof (the world keeps making better idiots) but if you know what you are doing, then stuff “just works.” I managed to keep the same install of XP going for 4 years, with no virus issues, and everything working as well as it could… but it was thanks to practicing very good computer hygiene. It required much more active maintenance and an extensive knowledge of “what not to do.”

I don’t know what I might be doing wrong with my XP woes, but it’s not unsafe computing. I’ve never, ever had a virus or the like. Ever. I’ve also never had virus-protection software (Norton or the like), except for Windows Defender which I don’t know what does but figure it shouldn’t hurt. Just today, not having done anything “interesting” to the computer, it started to have screen-repaint issues. I rebooted. The graphics card was no longer recognized, and I had to reinstall its driver. It took 5 reboots. —Jeffrey