mydadtheswitcher
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My Dad, the Switcher: Day 140
Yesterday, Robert talked about setting up a new Mac Pro for his switcher Dad. Today, setting up Windows proves to be a bit of a headache. When I mentioned to my best buddy Cameron that Dad was getting a Mac Pro to replace his just-months-old Mac mini, he said "Wow. He sure moves quickly when it comes to toys!" That he does. Just three or four months ago, he had bought his Mac mini. Now here we were, installing Windows on his tricked-out refurb Mac Pro. This was proving to be a problem. For me, mostly. He wanted to install Windows XP Service Pack 2, which, as far as we knew, would work fine. We started Boot Camp Assistant, and printed out the instructions. We had a whole 750GB hard disk to give to Windows, so we chose it and were restarting into that purgatory of Windows Setup in DOSville. After loading its various components ("Human Interface Parser" was our favorite), Windows Setup displayed the volumes available to install Windows, but our newly-created Boot Camp partition wasn't listed. Uh oh.
My Dad, the Switcher: Day 139
Last October, Robert's dad -- a hard-core Windows developer -- bought himself a Mac mini to see what the fuss was all about. The first two installments of the series are available here. Now, we find out what's happened since. Mom sent me an email about two weeks ago now, irritated. She said that Dad's old PC was making loud, awful noises, and it probably needed to be replaced. She said that he had been looking at new Macs all morning, after they talked about it over breakfast. She had given him the blessing of the purse-strings -- always a scary thing to give Dad -- and I gave him a call to see what he had in mind. The fan, apparently, in Dad's old PC power supply was wearing out, and the bearings were squealing. I had an old Power Mac G4 at work that had this happen, and replacing the power supply was something I could do. I offered to do that, but Dad was already miles ahead of me, looking at the newly-released Mac Pros. "Isn't that a little, uh, more than you need?" I asked, tentatively. "It's not a question of need," he said jokingly, noting that his financial ship had come in with the payment of a long-overdue check from a completed project. Dad was most interested in combining his Mac and his PC. Ever since he and I started working on the same project (which has expanded to projects, plural) he's finding that he uses the Mac more than the PC. The PC, he says, became just for email and Microsoft Office. Then, the perennial switcher question: "Do they make Office for Mac?" Yes, I said with a smile.
My Dad, the Switcher: Day 7
Last week, my previously-very-anti-Mac dad started using a Mac mini, and I wrote about his experience -- positive, to say the least. If you haven't read the story of his first day with the Mac, you might want to read that first. Yesterday, one week in, I checked in to see how he's doing. So far, Dad has nothing but positive things to say about the Mac. Even when I asked him specifically for things he dislikes, he had to think for a second. "It's such a breath of fresh air from what I'm used to, I can't come up with anything specific that I dislike." High praise indeed from the man who doesn't like The Daily Show because of its intro music. He also just discovered that, in Leopard, there's a little light underneath each application that tells you it's running. That was his huge discovery yesterday, and something he was proud of finding on his own. Asked about what he does like, he mentioned the ease of application installations. He loves Dashboard widgets, and installed the MySQL Health widget that comes with the MySQL GUI tools. He did this without my help, too, which is great progress.
My Dad, the Switcher: Day Zero
This is the first part of an occasional series about my Dad, who, as a long-time Windows user, decided to switch to the Mac. If you're interested in the whole story, more installments are here. As far as database management and Windows programming is concerned, my dad is what you'd call "hard-core." He's been writing software since the 1960s, starting at Honeywell, then Hewlett Packard, eventually starting his own business. He is an expert with the HP 3000 minicomputer, which, in its day, was heavy computing iron to have lying around. So it came as a bit of a shock when he called last week and said, "I'm ready to buy a Mac." He and I are working on a web development project together using open-source tools. Because his workstation is set up for the Microsoft world of SQL Server and .NET, installing XAMPP was wreaking havoc with his complicated array of security software, including Norton and BitDefender. He wanted to start fresh, and work on a system without having to worry about something randomly disallowing access to port 3306. Understandable.
