The Macbook Dive

A few weeks ago I took the plunge and entered the Apple world. The first week I only played with the 13″ Macbook (white, of course), and by the second week I had the Internet up and some programs running. Slowly I started transferring data files from the Dell I was using, and then eventually purchased Office 2008 for Mac. A brilliant suite, but Microsoft made a huge mistake to ditch Outlook and replace it with something they call Entourage. It’s a truly weak program compared to Outlook, which I had become so used to over the last 10 years. With Entourages lack of performance I’m almost ready to switch to Gmail for my main business emails. I use Gmail already but for limited usage.

The Mac definitely is pretty, and the Apple that lights up on the lid always seems to catch everyone’s eye. It’s small and compact, and the battery life is enormous, I don’t think any Windows pc can come close. The model I have lacks a DVD-writer, but it came with slot version of the CD-RW/DVD drive. I still have to get used to the one button mouse below the touch pad, but with a mouse the left and mouse buttons work as they would on a Windows machine.

Before I got hold of the Macbook I bought a 500GB Seagate USB hard drive. It was for backup purposes, and also for transferring all my data from the Dell to the Macbook. All my old data is now sitting on the USB unit, and some I’ve transferred onto the Macbook, but I’ve only just found out that I cannot copy from the Macbook to this 500GB drive – because the latter is formatted in NTFS, a format that a Mac OS can read from but not write too. I’ve seen some complicated solutions to this online, but this article titled “HOWTO – Read/Write to NTFS drives in OS X” seems the best. If anyone else has a better solution please give me a shout!

I’ll keep you informed about my journey on the MacPath.

Photo by tkramer