[Ronald Epstein]

Well, he finally did it!

For about a year I have been trying to convince my
business partner, Parker, to give up his PC and go MAC.

This week Parker made the move. He ordered a 20"
iMac with 2GB ram and Parallels/XP Home preinstalled.

The one thing I am very proud of is that HTF has one
of the better active Mac support communities out there.
I know that when I have a question it gets answered far
quicker on this forum than on MacRumors.

I am certain Parker will have a lot of questions as he is
in the process of carrying over all his PC stuff to Mac. I
think that having Parallels and XP on his iMac will make
that process much easier. In time I think, like most of us,
he will completely give up the crutch of XP and use OS X
exclusively for all his software needs.

If any of you have any advice on how Parker can best move
his photos, documents, bookmarks and other stuff to Mac it
would certainly be appreciated.

Welcome aboard, Parker!

[Lew Crippen]

I assume that the photos are all in standard formats (TIFF, JPG, etc.) Those can just be transferred directly. iPhoto works OK and will read everything directly, although I don’t have much familiarity with that app, as I pretty much use Photoshop.

As for documents, if you created them using Word, all of the Mac office products will read those created on XP quite easily. The same is true for Excel. As I recall, when I switched to a Mac as I left the corporate (PC) world, there might have been a few compatibility issues with a couple of obscure PowerPoint features, but as I no longer make presentations, I don’t really care.

I agree that you won’t look back, as I only use XP for a very few apps that won’t run under OS.

[Sam Posten]

Grats Packy! For me its still not one or the other but BOTH by necessity of being a gamer.

I recommend ya grab a Western digital USB drive, from Costco if you have one, and grab Microsoft's Sync Toy and drop all your data onto that, then simply take that drive to the mac and import it to the various app's spots in your home directory on the Mac...

[DaveF]

Super! Welcome aboard.

Parker -- what will you use for web development on the Mac? (I'm guessing you can't manage HTF with iWeb )

[Andrew Pratt]

Dreamweaver works just as well (if not better) on a Mac

Welcome aboard Parker :T One thing you should consider doing is bumping up that ram to 4 gigs right of the hop. Ram is very cheap these days and if you're running two OS's at the same time having as much as you can will help a great deal....it'll be the best $50 upgrade you'll do.

[BrianShort]

I so far have not installed XP on my MBP, mostly because I'm too cheap to buy yet another OEM copy of XP. That, and with SP3 coming out soon, I may as well just wait for that. I don't really have anything I need under XP anyway. I've pretty much moved what gaming I do to the PS3 (even though I have a number of PC games I never beat), and any other PC only programs I had I used so rarely that I figured I wouldn't miss them, so I may not even bother getting XP (or Vista for that matter).

[Daryl L]

Way to go Parker! You won't regret it. As for file transfer, I just used and external drive to move files. For bookmarks/favorites I was using Opera (my default browser) and firefox on Windows so I just moved everything in the FF profile folder and Opera folder to the corresponding folders on the mac (Safari is default browser now, I dropped Opera). For IE favorites I'd say export them out of IE and import in Safari.

[Eric_L]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daryl L

Way to go Parker! You won't regret it. As for file transfer, I just used and external drive to move files. For bookmarks/favorites I was using Opera (my default browser) and firefox on Windows so I just moved everything in the FF profile folder and Opera folder to the corresponding folders on the mac (Safari is default browser now, I dropped Opera). For IE favorites I'd say export them out of IE and import in Safari.

Ditto on the external drive. Having a backup provides considerable peace of mind.

'm a recent convert still trying to figure it all out. I have fusion instead of parallels. I was hoping to install a few PC games, but that part isn't working out so much...

[Michael_K_Sr]

But the new iMacs are coming out next week!

Ditto the comment on the RAM. 4GB can be had for less than a hundred bucks. You'll be happy you have it if you find yourself using Parallels often.

Photos, documents and bookmarks are easy. Pictures can be dragged and dropped right into iPhoto if you plan on using it. Documents (assuming these to be MS Office) can just be copied to the Mac and will open natively in Office 2008 for the Mac. Not sure what browser you're using on the PC side, but nearly every browser has an option to export bookmarks, which can then be imported into the Mac counterparts.

The files can be transferred by connecting an Ethernet cable between the Mac and the PC and using file sharing, but you may just as well get an external hard disk (if you don't already own one) to help facilitate the transfer. After all, when you're done you can reformat the drive and use it with Time Machine to keep your data backed up.