I finally did it. I bailed from the dark side and got a Macbook Pro. So in the coming weeks (months) I’ll be documenting my progress as I stumble my way through the conversion process. I plan on running Windows on the MacBook as a bridge so that don’t lose too much time while working. Leopard comes with Bootcamp and I also purchased Parallels to run Windows XP on the Macbook. There are a few pieces of software that I’m hoping to find good Mac replacements for. Currently I’m looking for something to replace Textpad and WinSCP. I’m sure the list will grow longer as I start to work on the machine more.

First Impressions
I actually got started on a Mac years ago, but things have changed so much that I’m quite a noobie on this machine. Once I opened up the box I was surprised that there wasn’t a “Read Me First” page right on top like they used to have years ago. I guess it was a bit too patronizing. The instructions that come in the box are quite minimal. There’s a little book that’s called “Everything Mac” that covers some of the basics such as how to plug it in, turn it on etc. Though it has a chapter that details how to add memory to the laptop, there isn’t a quick UI guide. They must feel that the UI is so intuitive that it doesn’t need any explanation. Though I’m not lost a quick run through on some basics would be useful.

First Steps
The first thing I tried was to connect to the internet using my 802.11g wireless router. And there I hit my first snag. After a bit of looking around I discovered “System Preferences”, which sounded good and quickly found “Network”. Once I clicked it I didn’t see anything to do with wireless. After killing a lot of time on the internet trying to find out how to run airport I finally gave in and called apple support. A 20 minute hold later and it turns out that my brand new fresh-out-of-the-box Macbook Pro is DEFECTIVE! The airport card doesn’t seem to be working and I need to go to the Genius Bar to have it looked at. Not a great start. I have an appointment in two days to have them look at it. Ugh…

Installing Leopard
The machine I got came with OSX 10.4 Tiger and a disk for 10.5 Leopard. While fumbling around with the wireless problem I decided to install Leopard to see if that would fix things. It didn’t because the wireless card is likely the culprit, but it was worth a shot. The install process is pretty simple. Stick the disk in, press the update button and go. It made me enter my user password and then rebooted from the disk. From there it only asked me 2 questions, one was language selection the other was to agree to the license. It then checked the DVD for consistency which took about 20 minutes and started installing. The entire install process took about 50 minutes but was completely hands free. After running the OS 10.4 and the new OS 10.5 I can’t really tell much difference between them other than the obligatory graphics changes and the ridiculous galaxy desktop wallpaper that replaced a fairly nice one from the standard Tiger install. I’m too much of a noobie to know what’s changed. The only thing I noticed was that the dock now contains what they call “Stacks”. So if you launch a bunch of related things they get grouped together and clicking on the icon pops out a list of the individual items. Its a neat visual effect though I’m not sure I like it quite yet.

Next I’ll write about setting up Parallels, a virtual machine that lets you run XP, Vista or any other operating system from within the Mac OS.

Read more: Mac