Switching to a Mac

[Moscow Mule]

MM - good points I bow to your superior knowledge of Macness - I am really not a strong advocate of any one machine/operating system over another, although my experience with Vista has been slightly sub-optimal.

You are too kind...

I would play with vista, but I'm not forking out £300+ for the version that allows you to run it in a virtual environment.

[nate922]

I've been on a mac since 10.0 and its been great!

Now with bootcamp, and vmware there's no reason why you should be on a pc!!

[daviejones]

Office 2008 for mac is superb. I create docs and can open them in Office 2007 on my XP machine at work. I also dual boot with XP, just for games.

My Mac is superb and I have no issues with it at all. I can find software to do any task I need.

[HYpno27]

Thanks to everyone for the useful tips. I think you've helped me make my mind up as you guys are confirming Apple's own marketing rather than not.

I'm off down the Mac road

[Diver]

SOB SOME

Switch Off Brain, Switch On Mac,Eureka!

[bellymonster]

A bit naughty but I downloaded OSX 10 from bittorrent and ran it within the free VMWare server product. It was a bit slow but you could get the feel for the mac os without shelling out a fortune.

Might be worth it to see if you cn get on with it ok.

[bogeyman]

Go for it.

I do quite a bit of Windows dev but have been a Mac user for a couple of years now.

I used to keep a couple of Windows boxes but they never get powered up nowadays.

VMWare's Fusion is superb for running Windows or Linux in a VM. The integration between your everyday OS X stuff and your Windows stuff is nearly seemless.

I have some Windows apps I can't live without: Visual Studio, SQL Server, and Quick Books. Everything else is done on the Mac.

Currently have a 24" iMac with 4Gb and an external firewire RAID. It's the older style iMac with the matte screen.

Throw away the 'Mighty Mouse' that comes with it though - it's utter shyte.

I use a wireless Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000, but the new flashy Logitech mouse works well also - just not with the built-in blue-tooth.

p.s. NeoOffice is a port of Open Office which does most of what MS Office does, for free. It's very good.

[Peter Loew]

Yes, I thought NeoOffice was amazingly good, the only thing that put me off NeoOffice is that it only has 2 developers, or something like that! That said, I am trying out Office 2008 and can confirm that it's not very good compared to the 2004 version. Give it a couple of updates and SPs and it'll be sweet though.

I use a Macbook Pro at work and use Merlin for creating project schedules, Bento for keeping a Projects database, and Office 2008 for the usual stuff. What's great is that most apps on a Mac can export to common file types like XML, MS Project, Excel, CSV etc. Go for it you won't look back.

P

[bogeyman]

Yes, I thought NeoOffice was amazingly good, the only thing that put me off NeoOffice is that it only has 2 developers, or something like that! That said, I am trying out Office 2008 and can confirm that it's not very good compared to the 2004 version. Give it a couple of updates and SPs and it'll be sweet though.

I use a Macbook Pro at work and use Merlin for creating project schedules, Bento for keeping a Projects database, and Office 2008 for the usual stuff. What's great is that most apps on a Mac can export to common file types like XML, MS Project, Excel, CSV etc. Go for it you won't look back.

P

I keep a copy of Office 2000 on a Windows VM to handle all those occasional niggly little compatibility things. Otherwise NeoOffice (currently 2.2.2) does the job mightily well.

I don't really care if they have 2 devs or 200. They seem to push out the updates fairly often.

I won't be lashing out for MSO for OS X anytime soon.

[Peter Loew]

I keep a copy of Office 2000 on a Windows VM to handle all those occasional niggly little compatibility things. Otherwise NeoOffice (currently 2.2.2) does the job mightily well.

I don't really care if they have 2 devs or 200. They seem to push out the updates fairly often.

I won't be lashing out for MSO for OS X anytime soon.

I used to keep Office 2007 on a Parallels VM too, but decided that since I never use it, I'd remove the VM.

I didn't lash out for MSO either It's a horrid piece of software that is so buggy (esp Excel) that it amazes me how MS could have released it in this state. I can't even open certain CSVs in Excel without it crashing every time. Absurd.