Journey to the Dark Side 1: Migration

On Thursday, December 20, 2007 the journey to the Dark Side began at Micro Center in Madison Heights, Michigan. I decided to shop there because they had an “open box” 15” MacBook Pro that someone had exchanged for a larger laptop but had never been used.

Basic stats: 15” monitor, 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 Gigs RAM, 120 Gig hard drive, video card with 128 MB RAM on board, and 800 Mhz front side bus and this system came loaded with the previous operating system Tiger OS X 10.4 but had the install disc for Leopard. Accessories and software: Parallels to run Vista and the Mighty Mouse (a wireless, bluetooth mouse). I also opted to go with a three year care plan through Micro Center because of an accidental damage coverage that AppleCare didn’t cover. (That was a very bad idea for reasons I’ll explain in just a moment.)

First impressions:
This is truly a beautiful machine with clean lines. Keyboard has a nice feel and I haven’t felt the kind of heat build up that make the Dell Inspiron difficult to work with after a while.
Culture shock: Things just aren’t w here they are “supposed” to be and that is the hardest part to get used to with the machine initially. E.g. there is no backspace; the delete button is the backspace and the delete but it only goes in one direction, back! Another example is the Mac Command button which functions pretty much like the Control button on a PC except that there is also a Ctrl button as well!
There are lots more things to get used which I will chronicle in other blogs but that really is the least of my challenges right now.

Migration Stagnation
The most serious problem I have right now is that I cannot use this beautiful new machine for any serious work because I cannot get the software in Parallels to transfer all the content and settings from my Vista drive. There is address and calendar software on the Mac but my phone (Samsung BlackJack) won’t sync! There is trialware on the machine for iWork (kind of like MS Works) and Office for Mac 2004 (which is lacks a Publisher like software.) Like all trialware they are crippled but pretty functional. I plan on using them as much as I can to try them out. So right now the MacBook Pro is like a dim-witted starlet, pretty but not much use!