As a IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad user I can appreciate the simple and elegant look and feel of the Apple laptop.  I decided to go with the 13.3″ Macbook Pro.  After upgrading to a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive and 4GB of ram this thing screamed, it was a vast improvement over my Lenovo X61.  The OS and software selection was unfortunately a different story. 

I booted in to OS X for the first time and began to play around with the menus and interface.  Every setting and control seemed to be out of place or difficult to find.  I began by installing Office Mac 2008 and configuring my company Exchange account in Entourage.  What was a simple process in PC Outlook resulted in many Google searches to find out what I was missing for MAC.  Eventually Exchange was setup correctly and all email, calendar, and contacts began to sync.  At this point I began telling myself “It’s not going to happen overnight, I will get used to this after some time”.  The next two weeks I searched for MAC applications that would replace the old PC counterpart.   I found Firefox to replace Internet Explorer, ZOC terminal to replace SecureCRT, and VM Ware Fusion to replace VM Ware Workstation, etc.  For me performing a task on the MAC took twice as long as it did in Windows, my keyboard shortcuts didn’t function, the OS X console was nice but I missed the command window, and why do I have to enable right-click?

After all the frustration I found the best feature OS X had to offer, Boot Camp.  Boot Camp allowed me to load Windows 7 Professional x64 natively on the Macbook.  I shortly found myself booting into Windows 100% of the time.  I found ReFit, which allowed me create a graphical boot menu and set Windows 7 as the default OS.  Windows does have its problems on the MacBook, the touchpad and right click is a learning curve, the battery life is not as great as it was under OS X, and the laptop keyboard is missing common keys.

Don’t get me wrong I love this laptop, it’s durable, thin, lite, and has all the built in ports and options that I need.  My choice to switch to MAC was a good one, once I discovered how well Windows ran on Apple hardware.   I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea!