New Computer - A Mac Mini

Last weekend I finally went out and made the move. The home computer was a P3-900 HP. It worked but it was very slow. As with many Windows machines, quite a lot of cruft had snuck in over the years, it didn't have USB 2.0, and it just needed to go. It may ultimately turn into a linux machine but then again, maybe not.

Now to the Mac. Much like the ads it just works. We picked it up on Saturday evening, and plugged it in. Plugged in my wireless mouse and keyboard, monitor and external 160GB drive off of the PC and fired it up. Worked great, and the USB2.0 external drive was smoking fast when connected to a USB2.0 capable machine. Her iPod needed to be re-initialized and updated to work with the Mac, but after that was done, the movement of files between the iPod and the Mac was smoking fast, again USB2.0 wins. I moved all of our pictures and music over in rather short order. My younger daughter pulled in the video from her first gym meet, picked out only the pieces she wanted and burned it to DVD. It took a while to actually render and create the DVD but it worked just fine. She also took a batch of pictures of the dog and created a video of his various stages of hair.

Yesterday I burned all my old data to DVD for safe keeping. There was a slight problem copying data direct from the external drive and burning it to DVD, so I had to copy it to the internal drive before going to DVD. I didn't investigate the problem very much since when I copied to internal and burned it worked just fine. The interesting thing that surprised me a little bit was that I was able to snap the DVD into my office laptop and it worked just fine, not sure why I thought it wouldn't work but I was a bit suspicious.

One other problem it has was in setting up quicken the setup just didn't want to import the data from my old PC, and instead insisted on breaking my link to the bank for synchronization. Ultimately I had to call the bank and have them mail me a new pin. I did some reading about the Mac version of Quicken, so downloaded the PC version onto my laptop and migrated to that. Still need to wait until the new pin comes in to synchronize, but I think that will ultimately be a better solution anyway.

I took all of my mp3 files, converted them to m4a files and saved about 50MB of space. The ripping of CDs through iTunes could not be simpler. I was always a MusicMatch user, until I started using iTunes - far superior interface. I followed the directions for creating a shared folder for keeping all of the iTunes data so that I don't end up with multiple copies of the same thing and needlessly waste disk space.

As for iPhoto - (Apple likes the i) - I've done a bit of reading and the sharing of photos between users doesn't seem to be quite seemless, but that will be the next thing that I tackle.

Network file sharing seems to just work. I turned it on so that I could move files between the two machines and was again impressed that I didn't need to do anything fancy to make it work. Somewhere along the line, some security patch or somethign prevented me from mounting drives from my home machine on my laptop. Happily, I can once again save my personal files from my laptop, quickly and easily to my home machine. I need to investigate encryption, but haven't had the chance to do so yet.

A few times I've clicked the terminal application to get a window into the underlying Unix type OS. Seems to look like the real deal, but I haven't really investigated all of the details yet. All in all I am quite pleased - I'd give it 8 out of 10, the shared iPhoto, and problems with Quicken knock it down a few pegs.