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Switching - ordered my first Mac ever!!!

S

siriusbeat

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 13, 2007
13
0
Connecticut
I finally placed my order last night for a new 20" iMac! :) Happy Birthday to me!! I custom ordered it from the online Apple store with the 256MB AT X1600, 2GB RAM, and the wireless KB and Mighty Mouse. I also took advantage of the $99 Final Cut Express deal. Can't beat that! I also get a 6% discount on Apple products since I work for a partner company, so that kind of negates the 6% sales tax in CT. I'm pretty excited to get this thing. Should be here in a week or so. I've been planning the switch to a Mac for quite some time now.

I also ordered Parallels with it and plan to run an XP build for work. I work from home and use a company supplied laptop hooked up to my 20" widescreen, but with the iMac, I won't be able to run a KVM switch. I figured I would just use XP on Parallels to do the work and just use the laptop when I really need to.

As for my own personal use, I am going to do the best I can to completely avoid any Windows based apps on Parallels. A couple of sticking points... Stamps.com has no Mac version, but I might just dump them anyway. I hardly use it and they whack me $7.99 a month just for the service. I currently use Quicken Premier 2005 and I've heard that the Quicken Mac 2007 kind of blows, so I'm not sure what I'll do. I may switch to iBank or Jumsoft's Money2. I tried the Windows version of MoneyDance and while it works, it's kind of clunky. I also use Quicken Bill Pay, so that functionality may be lost if I don't stick with Quicken, but I could just switch to using my bank's online bill payment and then just manually enter the entries in the register. Plus, my bank's bill pay is free versus the $9.95 a month for QBP. Also, looking to get Roxio's Toast 8 Titanium (for DVD copying/burning and the TivoToGo) and Econ's ChronoSync 3.3 for syncing files to an external drive. I'm kind of bummed that Messenger for Mac doesn't support video since I use the webcam a lot with my friends and family who all use Windows Live Messenger. I may have to get them to go with AIM or Skype instead.
 
aMSN is very sluggish, but it works :) Adium is the best IMO, although it doesn't support webcam or audio (yet).

The iMac is the best Mac IMO, insanely fast, fantastic design and that low, low price!! :D
 
siriusbeat said:
As for my own personal use, I am going to do the best I can to completely avoid any Windows based apps on Parallels.
Click to expand...

A wise idea. There are adjustments and you will never be comfortable making them if the first thing you do is turn your Mac into a Windows machine. There is also a lot of Mac software to explore which you probably never heard of since it is not available for Windows.

Congratulations on buying a fine machine. One of the best things about a Mac is the community. Come back if you have questions (and let us know how you like the machine when it arrives).
 
iBank is quite good, I hope that with iWork 2007 they include a spreadsheet application, that way I can drop microsoft office totally. adiumx is good and they may offer video support soon its certainly not off the cards. I hope you enjoy your new iMac, 2gb of RAM is a god choice, would not run mac osx with anything lower. :apple: all the way.
 
iCalc

cwedl said:
iBank is quite good, I hope that with iWork 2007 they include a spreadsheet application, that way I can drop microsoft office totally. adiumx is good and they may offer video support soon its certainly not off the cards. I hope you enjoy your new iMac, 2gb of RAM is a god choice, would not run mac osx with anything lower. :apple: all the way.
Click to expand...

I got my 20" iMac last month and love it! I ended up getting the package iCalc and iWrite from Mariner for my word processor and spreadsheet and so far, so good.:) Now just need to upgrade the RAM to 2 gb.
 
I've just switched from my 1 year old persoanlly made PC, to a MacBook Pro, and my god, the response I get from other students while writing that essay in class is a god send. Everybody loves my Mac, and want's one. The trouble is, I don't want other people buying one... I want to keep it a Matthew thing (you know, to have a Mac as a student)

:) :apple:
 
new iMac is here

The new iMac arrived this past Tuesday. Of course I spent the night setting it up and trying things out. It's taking some getting used to. Here are my first impressions:

-So quiet! This thing is quieter than my Thinkpad that I use for work and that thing is pretty quiet too.

-20" is a perfect size for me. I had a 20" widescreen Samsung on my PC, so this seems comfortable. The display is also nice and bright and clear... although I just found what appears to be a dead pixel.... not to happy about that, but at least it's only one.

-I ended up buying Quicken for Mac 2007. I tried Money2 from Jumsoft and iBank2 also. I just couldn't get into those two and they seemed to have problems importing my data. I had a heck of a time getting my Quicken 2005 Premier accounts to the mac, but once I figured out what was going on, it was a piece of cake. (I had to make sure that the category names weren't more than 15 characters long, otherwise the import skips them... it ended up skipping my paycheck entries for about 3 years, so my final balance was way, way negative... fixed the one category that was too long, imported again and it was right on the mark...) I have to say, I don't think the Quicken for Mac 2007 is as bad as people say. Maybe it's just because I really only use it as a register, to pay bills and keep track of my credit cards.

-I used Little Machines O2M to get my mail, contacts and calendar information exported from Outlook 2003. That worked quite well and I now have all my information in Mail, Address Book, and iCal.

-I love the way programs are installed and uninstalled. So easy compared to a PC.

-Downloaded the newest build of Parallels (2.5 - build 3186). Had quite a bit of trouble getting my first XP virtual machine built. Ended up having to do the custom VM and then setup bridged networking... the XP install kept crashing at various stages when I tried the express install or the typical one... both of which use the shared networking, I believe. Anyway, I was successful finally and managed to get a base XP install that I can clone for testing and for work. Very nice!

-Safari seems pretty nice, but I just installed Firefox. Firefox just seems a little easier to use to me.

-It's taking me some time to get used to the fact that when you click the red X button on a window, the app doesn't actually quit. Although, it seems like iPhoto does quit when you click that red X. Seems kind of odd there.

-Love GarageBand... the kids couldn't wait to try it out either :)

-Love FrontRow - especially for viewing the photos. It makes the photos come alive!




As for things I don't quite like:

-The fonts seem to be much smaller in OS X in some apps than they were in windows. I get a lot of emails from people with Outlook and when I read them the font is so tiny it's hard to read. I found that the apple key and + increase the text size, but I don't want to have to do that every time an email comes in. I was reading a story off an MSN.com site and the text was really small as well. If anyone has an idea why this is happening let me know.

-In the mail program, I have the new mail format set to Rich Text, but when an Outlook recipient gets my mail, they see it as plain text. They also complain that on subsequent replies, there are a lot of ">>>" in the previous sections.

-Right clicking with the wireless mighty mouse has proven challenging. Seems pretty inconsistent. A few times, I just plugged in my regular USB Logitech mouse and used it because it was easier. I realize that you can press control and left click to do the same thing, but I just can't get used to that.

-I messed around with iWeb a bit. Seems a little simplistic and maybe too stuck on the templates. I'll give it some time, since I really haven't spent that much time with it. I'll be redoing my own website soon, so hopefully it will do what I need it to do.

So, those are my first impressions. I really like the iMac and am spending a lot of time getting to know the ins and outs.
 
siriusbeat said:
-20" is a perfect size for me. I had a 20" widescreen Samsung on my PC, so this seems comfortable. The display is also nice and bright and clear... although I just found what appears to be a dead pixel.... not to happy about that, but at least it's only one.
Click to expand...

You should take it in to an Apple Store. They're great about taking care of things like this on computers under warranty.
 
Got my wife to switch

I got my wife a HP laptop and went to a Apple store and got a 1.42 GHZ iBook G4 in 2006 (GREAT LAPTOP!) 60GB HD 1.5 GB RAM. Well as Im buying the iBook the Apple store guy that was helping me started to show my wife how a Apple works and how the OS looks (my wife is big on pictures) She fell in love with it and iPhoto and that day we returned the HP laptop back to the store we got it from and went back and got my wife a 12" iBook G4 and she has never looked back! She had always used a windows PC and I had never had a computer before this but I did have a room mate that had a G4 tower and a G3 iMac and a G3 Powerbook back in 2000. He let me play on the G4 witch at the time was considered a MEGA SUPER COMPUTER! And I was hooked big time and Google was amazing to me! So that why I got an Apple when I decided to get a Computer. One of the few thing I've got right when it comes to my wife. I love her
 
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