Portraits of Place

After 20 years of working with PC’s, I’ve decided to buy a mac to give it a go. I purchased a macbook pro 13, which is arriving today. Should I have changed systems, after knowing windows intimately for 20 years? Am I inviting unnecessary headaches into my daily workflow? My previous day job duties included system administration of a windows domain, and all the headaches that go with that. I was the guy called upon to fix the daily problems with all the PC’s in the office, and administer the server, set up the domain, maintain printers, do all the software installations etc etc. So it’s no wonder I want to get away from windows. And yet it is the beast I know well.
Why change now?
Was it the incessant goading from mac friends – the slick presentations by supreme leader Jobs -or the “it just works” rumors I keep hearing (which I’m doubting)?
Regardless, my Dell M700 laptop is showing its age, and I need a replacement. Looking around for new laptops is a discouraging business, I put my time in reading reviews, and the macbooks kept coming up as a good answer. The thing is, I can run windows on the mac, using a number of different solutions – bootcamp is a dual boot setup – you start the computer in either OSX or Windows. Like having 2 different laptops in one. Or I can run Parallels, which runs windows virtually in a window on the OSX desktop. Since my macbook pro came with a copy of Parallels included, that will be the option I will try first.
Here’s the big question I have, will my PC software run on the mac well? I have a lot of PC software, versions of Dreamweaver, Photoshop CS5, video editing software etc are for PC. So this is a test to see if that software will work well on the Mac hardware. If it does, I’m a happy camper. Luckily adobe lightroom 3, my most often used software, is both PC and Mac ready, and the adobe’s license allows me to have an installation on my home PC, and one on my macook pro.
So if your interested stay tuned for my trials with the partial switch to mac – and the problems I encounter. This could get interesting.