Moving to Mac – an update

Some weeks ago, I wrote about my planned transition to Mac. Well, that is now history. My iMac, with its beautiful 5K display, is my new Best Friend. I successfully transitioned all the software/activities from Windows to Mac in one of three ways:

• I simply installed the Mac equivalent of the Windows software. Examples are MS Office, which works beautifully, and Adobe Lightroom, which required care to transfer [I could do it more easily knowing what I know now], but is now in its element.
• I found other apps to replace some things I needed.
• I looked for other approaches to achieve my goals. These rethinks mainly seemed to result in a better solution than I had before.

The process has not been without pain, but it was worth it. Apple computers are not perfect, but my day to day hassles are now reduced drastically. I am not going back!

Yesterday, I had reminder of the car crash that is Windows on a bad day …

I had been invited to present a talk at a nearby camera club – about an hour’s drive from my home. I had been in touch with the local guy and sent him my PowerPoint file to check out, as I do not like leaving this to chance. He reported that it was all fine. I showed up in good time and we tried to get the presentation to work on their [Windows 8.1] PC. The PowerPoint Viewer could not read the file. We tried the copy on the memory stick that I had brought and the computer just seized up – the mouse pointer disappeared and there was no response to the keyboard. We power cycled the computer, but still could not get anywhere with the presentation.

The start time was looming, so we tried another laptop – Windows 7 this time. That was more successful, after a couple of tries, we got the slides onto the screen. We had about 1 minute to spare! I started my talk and got to about slide #10. The screen cleared and the computer announced that it was installing updates 1 of 23 … There was no way to stop it. We could just wait while it finished and rebooted and let us in again.

Next time I am going to do the presentation from my MacBook, iPad, or iPhone. Or maybe I will get an old-fashioned OHP.