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Moving to Mac Made Easy
Jaguar777 writes "According to an article on CNET, Apple has a new weapon in its campaign to woo PC users: a $59 piece of software that makes the switch to Macintosh easier.
Detto Technologies has started selling Move2Mac, a combination of software and a custom USB cable that helps PC users move many of their files, settings and even background pictures to a new Mac running Mac OS X 10.2. Sounds nice. Is there anything like this in the works for the penguin masses?" Detto has had software to move settings from one PC to another; Apple requested them to make it to move from a PC to a Mac, and will carry it in their retail stores.
In addition to this software apple has the following guide on how to move common settings over to a mac should it not be intuitive already. Guide to Switching to a Mac.
Oh cmon, I'm tired of people complaining about how expensive Macs are. I'm a Marine, I earn below the minimum wage, in fact well below the poverty line. I take home $2012 each month after taxes. With that, I have to pay ~$1000 (USD - Yen rate fluctuates) plus food, gas, adsl etc and provide for my wife and 2 kids. Yet I can afford an ibook, and old PC, and just ordered an iMac for the wife. They are not that expensive, if you just manage your money and save for a while. I'm sure someone in the IT industry could do better than me ;)
Just hold tight until Wednesday. Apple is releasing new iBooks and TiBooks. The new iBooks will start at $999 and TiBooks at $2299. They'll both get quicker processors and in some cases larger harddrives. No Superdrives this time around so you might have to wait to burn DVDs.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
I used it when I got my laptop to copy all my mail, dialup, desktop settings to my laptop. It ended up catching all that crud I always forget. Laptop and desktop both have the same "feel" now at about 1/4 the time for a setup (win2k to WinXp.) No, it didn't copy games and applications, but it copied the settings for some if not most of the apps... I can't remember if it copied my PC Anywhere stuff but I think it did. It definately copied all my playlists and MP3's. Just tell it what you want moved or not then let it do its thing. (Downside: USB1 was slower than molasses in January.)
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
'sok.
Just copy over the PST files to your Mac and run this:
Outlook 2001 for Mac
--NBVB
My guess is that at least a third of all current PC users have systems with computers without USB ports or Windows 98 (the minimum Microsoft OS that supports USB). This product would be useless to them, since, before USB, there was practically no common interface options available between Macs and PCs. PCs had parallel and serial ports, and Macs before 1998 had SCSI and their DIN-8 serial ports (which are commonly used now for PS/2 style connectors on PCs).
Older PCs don't have CD burners, either. So, to get your data from an older PC, you'd need at least one of the following, in order of ease:
- An Ethernet card (connect by Windows file sharing between Mac, which all have Ethernet, and PC)
- Windows 98 or greater (if USB is available)
- A CD burner
- The Internet (e-mail some files in small amounts to yourself or a friend)
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
There was a writeup of the Move2Mac program in the latest MacAddict magazine, and it specifically mentions that it doesn't just do file transfers, it also tries to transfer as much as it reasonably can from Outlook, OE, or some of the other more popular Win mail clients into the Mac equivalent, as well as internet bookmarks and cookies. Handling the email/PIM information is probably much more important to most than making sure the background picture is still the same, and that's part of this M2M program's selling point.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Sonar now has Broadcast Wave support. Broadcast Wave support saves all of the timecode and edit information. Cubase SX (and Nuendo for sure) has support for it.
You can save the project in Broadcast Wave (or TLAudio), and open it directly in Cubase - everything will be placed in the right place without having to realign everything yourself.
And Cubase works better on a Mac than on a PC.
Was that easy enough for you?
You misunderstand the PURPOSE of VirtualPC. It's good for slowly weaning you off of your Microsoft addiction, and getting you addicted to MacOS X applications instead.
The other purpose is to run those niggling little programs that the Accounting and IT trolls insist on installing. Let them plop into the VPC pseudocomputer, and leave them inactivated.
Virtual PC is a boon to Mac heads stuck with clueless, yet gullible IT departments like mine.
Well a lot of "Mom & Pop PC users" may not have USB either
." yes, you can do. But this is not for you.
All new macs have USB, though most have Ethernet also, an honest to goodness 10Base-T port (anyone else remember AAUI? lets make it harder to connect to Ethernet, but easier to connect my Mac to that 10Base-5 line that I run...). PCs of the last couple years are more likely to have USB than Ethernet. UHCI controllers are damn cheap, and have come standard on the motherboard of every PC I've seen in the last 3 years.
To use the (self ironic) Pearl Jam song title, "This is not for you". This is for folks who do not know that the image that is their desktop is a a bitmap and how to convert it to a mac image file and put it in a place to be used as the Mac desktop. This is for folks who don't know where their Windows desktop directory is and how to copy stuff to their mac home directory, where they also don't know its location. This is for folks who don't know what linefeeds are and how to convert them. (Hmm, just came over me, does OS X use classic Mac linefeeds, or UNIX style?) This is for folks who don't know where their bookmarks file is on IE and how to convert that over to their shiny new mac. Most importantly, this is for folks who don't care and don't really care to learn. They just want stuff done. By and large, the folks on Slashdot like doing stuff like this, and like learning. Anytime there comes a device that obviates the need for learning, they scratch their heads and wonder "why bother? I can do . .
Unfortunately the doc is light on the technical side. USB only allows one controller and one host, everything else is a passive device. I wonder how they get this stuff to work, my guess is the PC is the real controller, and the hardware fakes some stuff out to make the mac export its hard drive as a target device, and essentially copy stuff to the new drive. Anyone with more details?
Now, let's do compare apples to apples. First, a dual 2.0 Xeon will beat the living crap out of pretty much anything, and is complete overkill for the desktop. It won't even help for games, really. It's more than fair to compare the high-end single-chip designs, like the 2.8, to dual-chip 1.25 Macs. I plugged in the same options you did, and got closer to $2300. So I would think that the difference is more than you state - a state of the art PC is $1000 cheaper than a comparable Mac.
;).
Now, to be fair, Mac OS is the best all-around OS that I have ever seen. My next computer would be a mac if it weren't for the cost, which is even more dramatic on the low end (I can build a good, new PC for $750, double that for a good G4).
And for those of you who have said "save up," I don't want to! I would rather get more computing power for half the price with the Intel architecture. And, although it's a pain in the ass, I'll dual-boot windows and linux to get a decent OS between the two of them
Honestly, Motorola is KILLING apple. Their growth curve is way behind intel...meaning, if apple used to have the processor lead, they don't now.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat