I searched for mac video training and found a bunch of videos that were a big help. I just wish I had of found them before stumbling around aimlessly for a while!

http://www.squidoo.com/apple-s.....nt-coupons

However, I just discovered today that Entourage doesn’t sync tasks with Microsoft Exchange servers. As a disciple of Getting Things Done, this is a deal-breaker for me. I need to work with tasks on my BlackBerry, and I’m not willing to physically sync what should sync over the air through Exchange.

I know Microsoft’s Mac unit is coming out with a new Office suite – one that doesn’t include the awesome new toolbars in their PC version, which also frustrates me – but I’ve heard that the new version of Entourage STILL won’t sync tasks with Exchange.

Is Microsoft trying to discourage serious business customers from switching to Mac? If so, isn’t this an anti-trust issue? If my BlackBerry can sync tasks with Exchange, why can’t one of Microsoft’s own products?!

As a last resort, how well could I run Outlook on a MacBook Pro using VMware? Is it even worth switching if that’s how I have to run my system?

The other new feature I use all of the time is Spaces – I develop .NET apps in a Windows 2003 Virtual Machine and have that run full screen in a Spaces window. That way I do not have to resize, fumble around with too many windows on the main desktop.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there were numerous security patches out for Vista the day it was released … and a set no more than every four weeks since.

The 10.5.1 patch set primarily focused on the firewall, which was working as designed but the design was stupid (interestingly enough, in some of the same ways that the XPSP1 firewall was stupid). It only took them a couple of weeks to fix it; IIRC Microsoft took more than a year And even in the state as-shipped it was only a problem for new network services added by the user that ran as root.

If you want to talk about Mac OS screw-ups the really big one in Leopard is if you have an admin account with 8 or more characters in its password that was created prior to OS X 10.2.something. The account is disabled on upgrade, and fixing it is not very straightforward unless you have the “how to” script in front of you (took me almost an hour to devise a way to do it, although I rarely try to do admin things by hand on the Mac).

Other than the firewall security bugaboo OS X has been pretty much a dream to work with. No malware to speak of (I once got to spend 14 hours cleaning out a relative’s Windows PC, and we got one bit of malware in-house even though we’re pretty careful). Upgrades are, with the exception of the Leopard admin issue, very slick. And until you try it you just can’t believe how good the Migration tool is when you get a new Mac. Wire the two together, push a button, and half and hour or so later you have your old configuration, en toto, running on your new, faster, better hardware. None of this ten-hours-of-reinstalling-your-apps nonsense.

Nothing is perfect, and anyone who tells you the Mac experience is perfect is lying. If you lived through the 90s Mac experience you will recall all kinds of nastiness.

But since OS X it has been remarkably good (then again, they leveraged almost thirty years of OS development when they switched to a UNIX base). I’ve had the occasional pretty weird problem over the years, and I do get called on occasion to help fix friends’ and relatives’ Mac issues. But we’re talking about an average of less than one a year amongst the whole network of these machines I work on. Windows requires significant messing-around every three to six months PER PC.

I eventually decided that it was too time-consuming to fix problems as they came up (and often the only “fix” was a reinstall anyway) and bought Acronis’ cloning software. If the PC is messed up we plug it in and replace the disk with the backed-up image. That is pretty easy but cost me $100ish for the tool and still has to be done far too often for my tastes. To date I have never, not even once, had to do that to a Mac.

In fact, I have had only two serious problems with Macs since I started using them again in 2001. I already mentioned the Leopard issue. The other was a failed laptop hard drive. You would not believe how hard it is to replace the hard drive on a 2002-era 12″ PowerBook. It’s insane.

Back to Leopard, there is really only one reason to upgrade from Tiger: Time Machine. It works unbelievably well, and is by far the easiest such tool I have ever seen. Incremental backups happen every 10 minutes and other than a little drive noise I don’t even notice them. It’s crazy good, but of course it took some very unusual filesystem design to do the job; everyone else has to do a sweep of the whole filesystem, Apple’s design allows them to only ever visit directories that have had files change in them. That is the biggest improvement in OS design since the journaled filesystem, now some 20 years old.

There are some things that you simply cannot do without Windows, which is why we have two Windows PCs at home. They mostly see use as gaming machines, though; for real work we all use the Macs, and for server duties it’s Linux, Linux, and more Linux (incredible bang-for-the-buck).

YMMV, I suppose, but he’s right that most consumers would have a much better experience with a Mac than a Windows box, with the exception of the dearth of cutting-edge games. It works better. A lot better.