My experience: Moving from Windows to MAC

Hey guys! I recently bought MAC mini, and in this article I would really like to share my experience with you in transfer from Windows to MAC. I personally used windows since the time that one use to feel ms paint is great. At that time I had never thought that  I will use MAC sometimes. I also tried Linux, but the joy and satisfaction MAC gave me, windows and Linux were nowhere.

It was an old MAC mini which gave me 10.3 installed in it, but no wonder I had an upgraded version which I immediately gave a run. It took about 35 to 40 min to complete the installation. Then I had 10.4 Tiger. Many people who own what some call “Series A” Mac Minis have complained about the Mini being slow when they upgraded to 10.4 Tiger, but for me it seemed faster than before. .After the initial sweep of the desktop I promptly loaded the Disk Utility and formatted my external HDD to HFS+ so I could store applications on it, instead of using the 40GB internal HDD. If I hadn’t read the external HDD’s formatting for Mac OS X user guide, I probably would have spent a while searching for how to format the HDD.

5 cool features of MAC

• All the applications have a single shared tool bar. This was difficult for me to use. Reason being a long lasting use of windows.
• MAC allows any one to surf and check their mails due to the feature of Guest Log-In Accounts.
• Take advantage of Text Edit support for the Word 2007 and Open Document formats for reading and writing.
• Save the configuration of all your open windows as a workspace. The location, window settings, and shell configurations of multiple windows can then be recalled instantly.
• Get yourself a .Mac account and your System Preferences can stay in sync across all your Macs. No matter what Mac you use, you’ll feel right at home.

Some more features

• Application installation: For the vast majority of applications this involves double clicking on a *.dmg file (Disk Image); Mac OS X mounts the image as a drive and then you just drag the Application to the Applications folder, or in my case onto my External HDD. Un-installing involved dragging the application from the Applications folder to the Trash can, I personally prefer this over the Windows way of installing and un-installing applications, but that may be personal preference.

• Things I liked in MAC: Firstly a DVD Player. I understand that Microsoft can’t include a CSS decoder in Windows because all the DVD software producers like Cyber link, etc would claim unfair business practices because it was decreasing the number of possible customers for their products, kind of like what happened with WMP in the EU.

I don’t know why people say that windows are the best when they have so many options available. If I have an option between windows and Linux, I would surely go for Linux. Reason being open source and I will get lot of things to learn from it. I admit windows is a user friendly OS but people should also explore.

• GUI transition, what are my thoughts on the GUI? well I like it, being brought up on Windows, KDE and such I personally would have preferred a start menu approach but that’s basically because that’s what I’m used to, but finding applications in Finder isn’t all that difficult to get used to. In terms of adapting to the GUI, I’ve begun to use keyboard shortcuts more and more, I personally thought the one buttoned mouse would be a hindrance to the OS overall usability but in fact it has little bearing on its usability in my opinion.

So far I haven’t really come across any media files or such that are un-usable, only media I can not access is Yahoo’s Video Launch service, but that’s due to it requiring Netscape 4.7 being installed when accessing using Mac OS X, which is a bit sad when you consider how old Netscape 4.7 is.

Overall I am enjoying MAC.

(Image credit: Google)

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[Editor’s Note: This post is submitted by our guest blogger  Prateek Dixit, the owner of thetechnoclub.

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