My Dad, the Switcher: Day 139

I think it would have been MUCH smarter if your dad bought the new Mac Pros instead of sticking with older generation hardware, especially since the new Intel CPU is *such* a significant jump in performance. I generally agree that refurb. is a good way to go, but not when the technology in it is so outdated. He should have taken advantage of the new "Nehalem" processor.

I would have gone with the cheapest 8 core (2.26ghz), which would give him an ability to upgrade in the future when prices for the other CPUs drop in price. Buying the old 3.2 ghz gives him no room to upgrade. He can then get ram/hard drive from a 3rd party for significantly cheaper than at Apple.

man, i'm addicted to these stories, looking forward to tomorrow's!

Congrats on the new media center :D

Congrats on the new machine.

Moreover, let us know how that Mac Mini as a media center goes and what you are going to do to get it to work.

If you use Synergy you can remove the need for KVM and share clipboard (it's slightly more limiting than Parallels). I set that up for people at work and my brother (professor) this way no matter what the setup (Windows, Linux, Mac).

Personally, I current use a Mac Book Pro with virtualization, but my CPU needs are much less than most (web development).

Ever since I've started using NeoOffice (a port of OpenOffice that is more mature and much faster than the "official" one, also can deal with multibyte languages much better), I've never looked back and I'm having less problems opening Office files than with MS Office itself.

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

You have to stop at the word Parallels. I am a Vmware Cert Prof who does Vmware deploys like ACE and Virtual desktop Infrastructure. If I can say one thing about macs and VMs is that there is no comparison between the two. Fusion hands down just decimates Parallels. I cant tell you how many large mac shops that we have ripped out Parallels.

I'm surprised nobody has said this yet, but keeping your Time Machine backup in the same case connected to the same power supply as your main rig is asking for trouble. If a power surge kills your computer, your backups may very well be gone with it. You also risk stressing your backup disk as often as your primary drive when you power it up and down every time you turn your computer on and off. You would be much better off keeping it as a separate component, whether you go with an Apple-branded solution or not (there are many alternatives). Just something to think about.

@Richard said 6:34PM on 3-12-2009

With Fusion (not sure about Parallels), you can set your 'My Documents', 'My Music', etc, folders to target your Mac OS Home folder equivalents. This way all your documents are in one unified space, outside the Windows disk image, and your Time machine will then work perfectly as expected.

You'll find these switches under the Settings->Sharing tab for your Windows image. You will be required to logout/in of your Windows user for the change to take effect; be sure to migrate your Windows documents to the Mac home folder first.

ummm... if he's going to be running Windows under Parallels, anyway, why not save a few hundred bucks right away and just run his old MS Office for Windows in transparency mode? Then he won't have quite as much Mac Migration Shock Syndrome. Then, when the next version of Office for Mac comes out, up(cross)grade then.

Also, I hope you were smart enough to use the image migration tool from his old PC, so that you could move his entire XP install directly to the Mac without having to reinstall everything from scratch. Unless his Windows install was fragged or polluted, the advantages of just dealing with minor pollution while you slowly migrate all your tasks under the Mac OS is well worth it for switchers.

I guess we'll find out tomorrow what game you played to get Windows up.