I'm converting!

[Jim Morrison]

I am ditching my Dell for a Mac Notebook computer. Does anyone out there use 'Pages' to write reports?

What do HI Mac users use to write reports?

[Chad Fabry]

What do HI Mac users use to write reports?

Typists on pc's?

[Jim Morrison]

The Senator from Rochester brings up a good point.

Are there any Mac-usin' HI's?

[Jim Katen]

I am ditching my Dell for a Mac Notebook computer. Does anyone out there use 'Pages' to write reports?

What do HI Mac users use to write reports?

Can't you just run Windows on the Mac and use whatever you used before?

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[Jim Morrison]

I can, but I'd really rather not. I use Word on my PC, and while 'Pages' is similar to Word, I'm told it doesn't have a function analagous to 'Autotext' which I rely on a lot. It's where my boilerplate is stored.

[Bill Kibbel]

I'm converting!

Will there be a ceremony? Do you have to get circumcised?

[Les]

Frank Lesh uses a Mac.

[kurt]

Filemaker Pro. Transparent between platforms. Of course, it's a database, so you'd have to change a lot of things. You'd have to suffer with things like unlimited picture display options, comment library options, and simple as pie data entry.

You'll probably end up running Parallels on the Mac to get your Word docs out. Switching back and forth, you'll see very quickly what a giant hairball the entire PC world is.

The problem with all MS products is they herd and corral you into places where you can't exist without them. The more I eschew MS, the easier and better computing becomes.

[randynavarro]

Windows 7 launch today, Jim.

Perhaps you jumped ship too early. . .

[Jim Morrison]

Windows 98 was very, very good. It was simple. I've had problems with every subsequent version and wouldn't buy Windows Anything.0 if it came with a free succubus. It just aint worth it.

My conversion to the Mac world is made up of equal parts love for the Mac and disdain for Microsoft.

No parallel operating systems for me, though. They make Office for Macs, and I'm just going to have to bit the bullet and buy it. I wish it were different, but i can live with that.

Best of all, there are no ceremonies, no Sunday AM obligations, no tithing, and no circumcisions!

Jimmy

[Steven Hockstein]

Windows 98 was very, very good. It was simple. I've had problems with every subsequent version and wouldn't buy Windows Anything.0 if it came with a free succubus. It just aint worth it.

My conversion to the Mac world is made up of equal parts love for the Mac and disdain for Microsoft.

No parallel operating systems for me, though. They make Office for Macs, and I'm just going to have to bit the bullet and buy it. I wish it were different, but i can live with that.

Best of all, there are no ceremonies, no Sunday AM obligations, no tithing, and no circumcisions!

Jimmy

Jim,

If you have an older and legal version of Office for Windows, there is a reduced price to upgrade. I think it is a little over $200 for the Upgrade.

My kids use Mac laptops and they swear by them. My wife uses a Dell Laptop PC and swears at it (Vista [:-crazy])! I use PC's in my office because the CAD program we use is PC based and I can't afford to change everything.

Good Luck. Let us know how it works out.

[ghentjr]

pages will work. we have always been mac users. In fact, I think I have had at least one of every model except the Lisa. we had our own program set up in appleworks, with pre written paragraphs that we brought into the report with a few clicks. pages should work well because of its photo handling capabilities. Mac's rule.

[Bain]

I've had it with MS and Vista, too, and saunter by the Mac aisle in Best Buy with a certain kind of envy.

Windows 7 might be an improvement, but it's not gonna work well until the first or second service pack comes out.

Let us know how smoothly the transition goes.

[esch]

Jim,

Know any college students that would do you a favor?

Alot of times a college book store will have the full blown version of MS office for a rediculous cheap price. I've seen it 50 dollars I've seen it 25 dollars for the 300-500 dollar program. Just a thought.

Matt

[hausdok]

I've had it with MS and Vista, too, and saunter by the Mac aisle in Best Buy with a certain kind of envy.

Windows 7 might be an improvement, but it's not gonna work well until the first or second service pack comes out.

Let us know how smoothly the transition goes.

Hi,

Well, it looks like Jimmy's made up his mind, so there's no point in arguing about it. Honestly, I don't know what all the fuss is about. If one realizes early on that Vista is crap and avoids it one won't have any problems.

I have two windows machines; well four if you count the laptops. My office desktop and one laptop are MX, the other laptop is NT, and the desktop my wife uses is a Vista machine. I understand the complaints about Vista because nearly every time I've sat down to use her computer it's locked up on me. That used to happen occasionally with the WIN98 box I used to have, but I've never had that problem with MX or NT programs. Since she doesn't really use her's for anything other than streaming her Korean dramas VIsta hasn't been a big deal for us and I work primarily off the $200 MX machine which has been pretty solid.

MS has known about all of the problems with Vista ever since shortly after it debuted. I do homes for a ton of MS employees so I'm always prodding them to talk to me about their products. I don't think I've ever had one of them dispute the fact that Vista has serious issues. More than one of them has told me that they've been using an in-house version of the Win7 for nearly a year and a half while looking for hiccups and are liking it a lot. That's a lot of beta testers! and I think they've learned their lesson.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

[randynavarro]

Ditto on the MS insider scoop on Vista crap.

More than once I've had a software geek client start rattling to me how Windows 7 is far superior to Vista. And to back it up they tried to explain all sorts of programming verbiage and terms I've never heard of before.

I quickly had to stop them after the first few words. . . way over my head.

Bottom line - 7 is supposed to be far superior.

[Jim Katen]

. . . MS has known about all of the problems with Vista ever since shortly after it debuted. I do homes for a ton of MS employees so I'm always prodding them to talk to me about their products. I don't think I've ever had one of them dispute the fact that Vista has serious issues. More than one of them has told me that they've been using an in-house version of the Win7 for nearly a year and a half while looking for hiccups and are liking it a lot. That's a lot of beta testers! and I think they've learned their lesson. . . .

My wife's been using an early release version of Windows 7 for about a month now. Her rousing endorsement was, "It's better than Vista."

Kind of reminds me of the guy who was running for mayor of Buffalo with the slogan, "Never Been Indicted!"

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[ghentjr]

Windows 98 was very, very good. It was simple. I've had problems with every subsequent version and wouldn't buy Windows Anything.0 if it came with a free succubus. It just aint worth it.

My conversion to the Mac world is made up of equal parts love for the Mac and disdain for Microsoft.

No parallel operating systems for me, though. They make Office for Macs, and I'm just going to have to bit the bullet and buy it. I wish it were different, but i can live with that.

Best of all, there are no ceremonies, no Sunday AM obligations, no tithing, and no circumcisions!

Jimmy

Before you buy office for macs, try some of the free mac software that runs windows programs. The one I use is called Neo-office but there are others as well.

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

[dcmeagle]

Home Inspector Pro runs natively on Mac, Windows & Linux. There's also a few Microsoft Word inspection programs that will run natively on the Mac as well.

[john_opwin]

Pages!! I cannot exactly recall when the last time was I used it. [:-magnify

[mgbinspect]

I honestly don't know if this works on a Mac or not, but it's worth looking into.

Sun Micros Systems has out a free open source office suite which is available through openoffice.org. It pretty powerful and opens, views and saves docs from Word, Word Perfect, etc and saves them into it's own format or the original format. It also can convert docs to PDF and HTML, so it's wuite a suite.

I didn't have much need to change horses, but I did find it pretty impressive, especailly when you can say goodbye to ever paying for word processor or spreadsheed software ever again.

[Marc]

I've tried it too, Bryan. The Sun Systems 'Open Office' family of applications attempts to duplicate MS Office. I've both, MS Office 07' and Open Office on a Vista platform. For me, Open Office isn't quite as good as MS Office, some features are lost, but if you'd like to try it Jim, it's a free download. There's a version for nearly every platform, so you can try it now.

I plan to ditch MS for Mac eventually, and was thinking of depending on Open Office at first, then buying Mac apps if I didn't like it.

I very nearly put a .38 hollow point thru my Vista a couple times, but after 18 months and a couple grand in IT fees, it's tolerable and I can finally enjoy the features that Vista has. Nevertheless, I'll be upgrading to 7 soon.

Marc

[Erby]

I've been running Vista Ultimate with HomeGauge and other programs for over a year and a half. Very little, if any, problems I can remember.

But then, I started with DOS and through all the Windows Versions.

[hausdok]

For home inspector work, one can purchase a Windows desktop running XP for about $200 and it will do just about anything you need to do. Why sink money into a machine to try and make XP work when it's cheaper to just replace the box?

OT - OF!!!

M.

[mgbinspect]

Marc, I'm glad someone else is familiar with OpenOffice. I agree that it isn't as powerful as MS Office, but then if you consider the power of MS Office Suite, being as close third is pretty darn amazing - especially as a free open source product. It's well worth looking at and should be plenty for report writing. I was unsure that it was available for Mac and am glad you were able to confirm that it was.

An interesting tidbit on Windows 7 - I've been building PCs from scratch for about 25 years and built about thirty of them between my own and my kids'.

Along that road I've relied upon a local PC repair guy, when I hit a snag. I also call him for recommendations and advice. Typically with MS products he has always advised to wait a while because MS will work out bugs over a couple of service packs. When Windows 7 came out, I called him and for the first time EVER he said without any reservation, "GET IT IMMEDIATELY!" He confirmed what I already had heard - it is resource friendly and fast.

Now one thing that shocked me and a lot of folks don't know - you can only upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista and NOT XP!!! In order to put Windows 7 on an XP machine, you have to format the hard drive and purchase the full blown version of 7, which is twice as expensive or get your hands on and install a VIsta upgrade prior to upgrading to 7. I found that FUNNY and a typical quirky Microsoft hurdle.

I purchased a mini notebook about 7 months ago, which was just prior to the release of Windows 7 and you'll notice that NO minis ever came out in Vista. They all came out with XP even though Vista was the latest Windows version out. That's because XP was lighter and actually proved to be a much more stable platform. Vista was a beast and was as unpopular among techs as Windows ME was.

Another thing that may be helpful to know - the newly released and free Microsoft Security Essentials (anti-virus and spyware protection) has gotten really decent independent reviews as being light and not a resource hog. I have personally found this to be true and have actually uninstalled my "paid for" antivirus and anti-spyware software from three of my four machines, even though they had months of license left, because they are running and especially surfing so much faster with Microsoft Security Essentials. It's great! One independent reviewer even claimed it caught a trojan none of the popular software did. And, inspite of this glowing endorsement, I'm, by no means, big Microsoft fan. They've just put out a couple of decent products in a row of late.

One thing I did not realize about Mac until a couple weeks ago - had it not been for the anti-trust deal a while back and Bill Gates deduction that it was cheaper to bail out Mac than suffer the legal alternative, there would be no Mac. I did not understand this.

I know there are a ton of graphic designers and photographers that swear by Mac and I have no doubt that in those arenas it is the ultimate. In fact, my cousin's husband, who is a photo journalist for the Southern Baptist Convention, of course, uses a Mac.

I've never been able to bring myself to make that leap due to such limited software choices. Being a bit of a software junkie, I'm afraid I'll find it frustrating as hell to constantly discover that a software I want to try isn't even available for Mac. It is, however, nice that the dark virus developers never seem to target Mac. That's a big plus...