Mac issues

We're not switching to Mac overnight. We planned to overlap thing while we move our files over and make sure we didn't lose anything in the process.

So far, we've only had a few glitches with the Mac, all of which I read about on sites like MacRumors, AppleInsider, TUAW, and MacNN. The MacRumors Buyer's Guide is very useful.

I went for refurbished units. That seems to be the best way to get a deal since most stores sell at or very close to MSRP. No problems in that respect.

One thing I read was that iMacs were overheating and locking up. So far I haven't seen that happen but I really haven't used the iMac for long periods and it's been pretty cool this fall/winter.

I did run into the "dead keyboard" problem on the MacBook Pro. Both Macs came with Tiger installed and a Leopard "Drop-in" disc. I did a clean install on the MBP and within days the keyboard was randomly going dead. I read that people who upgraded instead of clean install were not experiencing the problem, so I re-installed Tiger and upgraded to Leopard. That seemed to fix it, but just yesterday it happened twice. The trackpad still works, so I can do a restart to get it working again.

The Mail app won't read our corporate MDaemon server IMAP Inbox. I've read that other people have this problem too. I can use Thunderbird in the time being. Some people have worked around it by having their MDaemon mail forwarded to a GMail account. SMTP does work through MDaemon, so you just need GMail to read messages.

I imported our iTunes music and photos from the PC this past week. On the PC, I shared the My Music folder and imported it from iTunes on the Mac. If you have purchased songs on iTunes, make sure to log in to your account and authorize the computer before copying over. That makes it work smoothly. Otherwise you'll get a pop-up message and it will wait for you to answer before finishing copying. Anyway, it looks like everything made it over.

I also exported our playlists from iTunes on the PC. Had to do that one at a time but they imported and worked fine on the Mac.

Moving photos was not as clean, since we use Windows folders to organize our pics. We have ACDSee but don't use it's database features.

The folder organization for people, events, etc. was lost in the transfer. iPhoto automatically groups pics into events based on the file dates, but the dates of photos are not always when they were taken. Sometimes a file was copied or received via email and the date is no longer correct. We'll take this as an opportunity to clean things up and re-organize.

I'm trying to decide on Safari vs Firefox and Mail vs Thunderbird. They all seem pretty good. I use FF and TB on the PC, so I'm leaning towards them on the Mac. The Apple apps have nicer interfaces and better integration with the OS and .Mac (trying out the 60-day trial now).