How to Turn Your PC into a Mac

An anonymous reader writes "CNet is running a Mac fanboy's idea of a nightmare feature entitled 'Mock OS X: Five ways to make your PC more like a Mac'. While the idea of turning my PC into a Mac-like machine does get my juices flowing, I'm not sure the user experience would be exactly the same but I'm going to spend this afternoon trying it out anyway. "To borrow a metaphor from Spartacus, some people like oysters and some people like snails. Except what if there was a way to make your snail do some of the cool things oysters can do, like make pearls? And what if you could make your PC do some of the cool stuff that Macs do so well?"" Seems to me that this would be a lot easier if step one was install linux...

Comments

What about the other way around?

[garcia]

My father just bought my mother a 17" Macbook because he couldn't find a laptop he wanted to buy for her that didn't require you to buy Vista and then downgrade to XP later.

My mother despises MacOS and can't "figure anything out." Now while I don't care for MacOS myself I tried to explain some things over the phone to her so that she would at least be able to use it for the time being until my well-meaning father can figure out what to do to fix things for her. She pretty much was being unreasonable about the whole thing and said over and over, "I'm 57 years old, I don't want to learn something else."

My question for all of you is how, when I'm there at Christmas, do I make MacOS X more like Windows so that she's more comfortable with using the OS?

Re:What about the other way around?

[krunk7]

She pretty much was being unreasonable about the whole thing and said over and over, "I'm 57 years old, I don't want to learn something else."

I had to put up with tons of phone calls to support windows, clean of viruses, etc. my mother and father's windows computers. One of my main tasks when I came home to visit was "Look at the computer for a while", which means try and make it run like new.

I bought them a Mac about 2 years ago. At first, I got the same response. Endless whining about not wanting to learn something new. I simply told them that I was their computer "advisor and repairman", this was a lower maintenance, lower risk machine and if they chose to go back to windows they'd be on their own from here on out. Stick with mac and I'll be their free tech support bitch again.

Took a month or so, but now they'd never use windows again. In 2.5 years, I've received 4 phone calls. Two of them were a broke cable modem. The cable company kept telling her "it was a mac thing", but a surge had killed the modem. After insisting they replace the modem, everything worked. One of the calls was to ask me how to get from Hotmail to Gmail + Apple Mail.app. The third was to ask how to connect the internet, which used to be quite the support call with windows. Yes, I can do it quickly but trying to get a 55 year old woman who learned computers relatively recently to "Go to start, Right click Network Icon, blah blah" proved quite the trial often involving a couple of reboots and head scratching on why the hell it wouldn't come up. With her new Mac my only support advise was "Plug in the wire that looks like a huge phone plug on the end into the only place it'll go on the back of the computer".

My only point being, she comes to you for advice because she knows no better. If she's going to be stubborn, then return in kind. Just tell her you'll never help with computer issues again if she doesn't put minimal effort into learning her new one (I mean really, 99% of the effort is learning two new icons: Safari & Mail). Little does she know you won't really be doing any tech support whether she stays with mac or not. ;)