By You’ve decided to “think different” and become a Mac user. Here are the things to consider and steps to take as you make a big change to your computing lifestyle.
They finally wore you down. Your friends’ and co-workers’ tales of the MacOS –an operating system with such elegance that anyone could master it, so safe that viruses barely exists, and with powers and abilities far beyond those of, well, Windows—have convinced you to switch. There’s no better time than the holidays to make the leap, when you could receive a brand new Apple computer of your own as a gift.
Complete Comptia A+ training – Comptia A+ Certification at certkingdom.com
One little problem: After you boot up your shiny, new Mac, you might not have any idea what you’re doing. How do you move over your files? Can you use the same applications? And for the love of Jobs, how do you move your iTunes from Windows to Mac?
If you have any proficiency at all with Windows, it’s more about unlearning old ways of doing things. The devil, however, is in the details. The Mac differences, while plentiful, should be easy to overcome, so don’t fret, because we’ve got you covered.
Packing for the Move
First thing you need to do is backup all your important files for transfer. Luckily the days of file formats working on one OS platform and not the other are long behind us. Your video, pictures, music, and documents should make the switch-over without issue.
If you’re already using a backup and synchronize service like Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity or even Apple’s own Mobile Me on your Windows PC, they have Mac clients as well. You can get your important data transferred instantly that way. Unless you have a lot of files, then it won’t be very instantaneous.
Of course, a massive collection of files could also be transferred to external storage, from a USB flash drive on up to a multi-terabyte NAS on your network. Either should be equally accessible from your new Mac when attached to your home network. (Let’s not even go the route of backup to a CD or DVD, or that whole direct-cable-connection stuff. Spend a few bucks on a router if you don’t have one, it’ll make all the difference to network your computers and no one should be using a broadband Internet connection without one).
Things get a little trickier with specialized data like stored email messages. If you’re using Mozilla’s Thunderbird, which already uses the mbox file format, you can just take all the files and put them on your Mac and import them to Mac OS X’s Mail or the Mac version of Thunderbird. For other email software, you may have to export the data to mbox format. If you used Microsoft Outlook, you might have to buy third party software like MessageSave to do the conversion.
Better yet, just convert over entirely to using a Web-based email like Gmail or YahooMail, and then you can access your messages anywhere. There’s even a complicated way to get your Outlook file into Gmail. Below, we go into special detail on dealing with that most annoying and necessary of programs to transfer: iTunes.
No Comment