Today was the first day in the office with my new Mac. It's been a bit of a mixed experience so far, but I'm still excited about the potential of my new MacBook Pro.
Friday, I took loaded up my new MacBook, my old Thinkpad, and 3 external harddrives which I have been using, and took them to the Indianapolis Apple Store at Keystone at the Crossing. I left them for data to be transferred to my new Mac, and for loading some basic Mac I-Works programs.
By early Saturday afternoon, I received the call that the data had been transferred and I could pick up my new computer. Unfortunately, I left my copy of Fusion and Windows XP in the office, so they could not help me load it. But Erin at the Apple Store spent nearly an hour going over some basics in operating the Mac system.
Sunday was a study in frustration. One flaw I've found in the Mac is that when you enter a password for the computer, you do it only once -- that is, you don't have to repeat typing in the password. This means that if you make an error, such as hitting "Cap Lock" instead of "caps", or hitting the wrong key -- you get a password different from what you intend -- and what you remember.
That was the case with me. Because you have to enter the computer password to load software, it became a very frustrating experience for me. Likewise, the same was true of trying to sync up my I-Pod to the new computer (which, thanks to the Apple Store people, already had my 7,400 songs already loaded on the new MacBook). All of this ended up with me making a third trip to the Apple Store in 3 days for some tech help.
In the end, we got the password mess straightened out, and I got Fusion and Windows XP loaded. With a little help from a listserve of Mac lawyers, I also was able to load WordPerfect into the Virtual Windows environment.
Monday, I spent time setting up my email. It involved a little frustration, but not any more than I expected. The tech support at Iquest helped me through the process, and soon my email was humming in. I did find out, however, that the Apple store had not transferred over my addresses and email data from my Thinkpad Outlook program. But I'll be able to work around that for a while.
I was very pleasantly surprised that it took almost no time to set up the Mac to print on my office printer. It was just a couple of clicks, and I was printing away.
Not so with networking to my assistant's computer. The Mac was able to "see" my assistant's computer, but would not connect to it. That's the next major step, since her computer stores my case management data.
So, we move on to Day Two. May have to set aside the Mac learning curve for a couple of days so I can get some work done.
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