As soon as I got home with my new purchase I couldn’t wait to take it out of the box but would I know how to use it?  Where was the power button after all?  The laptop did come with a tiny start-up manual which I read in all of 5 minutes.  Basically I carefully removed the laptop from the uber cool box and pressed the tiny power button on the top right corner of the keyboard.  Viola, it booted up.  In mere seconds.  I so wasn’t used to this.  My PC was taking about 20 minutes to fully boot up, seriously!  And you know what…  when I’m done with using it for the evening, I close the lid.  When I’m ready to use it again, I open the lid and it’s ready for me to start working.  Seriously, done – close.  Ready to work – open.  It’s that simple.  I find myself saying a lot, “This is how it should be.  Simple!”

Part of the ‘simple’ set-up was finding our wireless connection.  The Mac found it for me and prompted me to enter our username/password combination.  Viola, we were connected.  And I found out later to my surprise, not only had it found our internet connection but it had already found our network connections; our shared drive.  And a couple days later when I found myself needing to print something and realizing I hadn’t set the printer up, I simply went to the printer icon in Settings and told it I wanted to add a printer and it searched and found it.  I didn’t see it download any drivers or anything, it just worked.  It just worked.  It’s simply amazing to me.  I didn’t have to leave the chair I was sitting in to go get a disk or find my manual.  I didn’t have to go to Canon’s website to download a driver.  It simply found it, connected and worked.  To me that’s impressive.

The only thing missing now was all my data.  How do I get my data from my old laptop to my new one, specifically my contact management items.  You know the necessities; email, calendar(s) and contacts.  Since I purchased my laptop directly from the Apple store they offered me the free service of transferring all my data for me but that would require my bringing back in both laptops for a couple of hours (or a day depending on the time I brought it back in and how busy they were).  While this is a very worthy service they offer and I highly recommend you considering doing it, I chose to do it myself for several reasons (knowing all the while I had them as a back-up should my attempts fail miserably).

First, I couldn’t bare the thought of being without either of my laptops, if even for a couple of hours.  I know, you don’t have to say it.  It really is pitiful but true none-the-less.  Second, I needed to take some time to clean up my old laptop and decide what information I really needed to transfer over.  I needed to sort through and determine what information I needed to keep, delete and/or archive.  Third, I wanted to do some research on what contact management system I was going to use.  I didn’t want all my information transferred over until I had an idea of where it needed to go and what format it needed to be in.  And finally, the most important reason I know, the best way to learn a new system I feel is to dig in and do things myself.  So I marched out of the store armed with my new toy and no idea how to use it.  I couldn’t wait.

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About two weeks ago, I made the jump and switched from a PC to a Mac.  Now this was not a decision I took lightly.  I had never been exposed to a Mac before and I have years of experience with a PC.  See I’m kind of my families and friends tech help person.  I’d taught myself how to reformat hard drives, install video cards and memory upgrades, hooked up networks…  but had never once sat down before a Mac.  Not until two weeks ago.

My earliest memory of a PC was when I was in high school, it was of my dad’s.  Along with it he had a dot matrix printer and a funky looking dial-up modem thing that looked something like this:

In college I had taken a basic ‘Computer 101′ class and my first job out of college used PC’s but it wasn’t until I was married that I owned my first one.  And get this, the hard drive was a whooping 800 MB.  I thought we’d never run out of room on that thing!  This was 18 years ago.  We’ve since been through at least eight computers; Packard Bells, IBM’s, Gateways and Dells.  Laptops and desktops.  And waaayyyy too many peripherals to mention.

About a month ago I got a wild hair to consider a Mac.  I was sooooo fed up with how my PC’s were operating.  I was having trouble with our families desktop no longer allowing installs to take place.  My laptop was so slow I was barely using it which meant I was missing emails and other important information.  I had considered this once before, briefly, but decided I didn’t have the time to learn something new.  I had so much time invested in PC’s, I felt I was too far down the PC path to make a change.  I was also concerned with the software.  Would files be compatible?  Would I be able to get software that was on my PC for the Mac?  Would I have to pay for it twice?  Questions, questions, questions.  So many unknowns I went with what was safe but this time was different.  I had to make a change.  So I did a little ‘google’ research and then walked into an Apple store and asked them a BUNCH of questions.  I walked out of the store with a 15″ Macbook Pro laptop, 500 GB.  I will never run out of room on this thing!

So, as I proceed down the path of learning the Mac way of life, I’m going to document the journey.  I’ll address some myths and the realities of switching.  The good, bad and the ugly will be shared.  Let’s see if I made a good decision.

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Hello.  Anyone out there?  Anyone at all?

Nope, I’m not talking to you, the reader, but rather to the author of this blog.  Me.  How embarrasing that the last post was a Happy New Year one, five months ago!  Seriously, what is the point of having a blog if it’s not used.  So it’s decision time.  Do I abandon it or commit to posting on a regular basis?

I’ve recently embarked on two new efforts; switching from a PC to a Mac and starting the overwhelming college hunt.  These are both pretty big undertakings and it’s a shame to go thru this alone and not share my experience.  Additionally, my head is just swimming with ideas, designs and thoughts.  I need to get them out of my head to make room for more so why not journal here!  So I’ve decided, I’m going to commit to posting more.  So here goes…

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