Two weeks into Mac land

it’s been just over two weeks since I’ve made my switch.  I thought I’d share some thoughts.

First, I don’t miss Windows. I’m amazed at how quickly this box does things, and it has 1/3 the memory I had in my Windows laptop.  I leave everything running all the time (Mail, Browser, Word, itunes, etc) and almost never see a beach ball (mac’s equivalent of hourglass).

I almost wish I had bought a new Mac, as I feel like I’d have more support from

But everything hasn’t been peachy keen.  Some of these are disappointments about things that work differently, some are flat out problems.

Update: Some of these remaining problems are already fixed and I’ve included updates as appropriate.

  1. [Solved] Although I can get the builtin Mail client working with Exchange, I can’t get Entourage working with it at all.  No errors, it just does nothing. (I needed to tell it to use a secure connection.  The Mail client just figured that out.)
  2. [Hopefully Solved. I did this.] I connected a Mac Bluetooth mouse to my laptop, but it gets disconnected when I sleep/wakeup.  I have to reconnect it in system properties. Yuck.
  3. I tried to connect a Plantronics Bluetooth headset but it didn’t work.  It said it was connected, but couldn’t get it to play sound. Mind you, I connected this same headset to my Windows PC no problem.  AND when I had it connected, my Bluetooth mouse starting acting sluggish!  As soon as I deleted it’s config, my BT mouse started working again.
  4. I found iMovie to be far from intuitive.
  5. [Solved. I installed Flip4Mac beta.] The regular versioin doesn’t support Snow Leopard yet.] I can play AVI files in Qtime, but not WMV files.  (It complains saying that QT has to be installed first.)
  6. Since I have the “tap equals click” turned on with my touchpad, I’m constantly accidentally dragging and dropping things.  Hate that when that happens. [This happens a lot less when I use the real mouse, of course.]
  7. There is a bug in the built-in Mail client that displays that I have unread messages when I don’t.  If I close it and reopen it, the number goes away.
  8. [Solved. it’s unaccepted appt requests!] I still have no idea what the number hoveriing over ical means.  it’s not appointments today. What is it?  Appointments this week?  I’m clueless here.

Still happy, though.

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

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