apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Like Anne, I'm considering the switch from PC to Mac, eventually. I'd do it ASAP but my budget doesn't allow for that yet, so I'm learning what I can now to make the transition smooth.

I'd like to hear from anyone who's switched from PC to Mac and how the switch went. I also wonder about troubleshooting why files don't print when you're using Microsoft products on a Mac...a candidate for a position at my day job was having trouble with that just this morning. Though I probably could easily enough come up with a work around or figure it out, it alway seemed to be a problem in the past and brought back that old, bad taste in my mouth of having cross over issues.

Thoughts? Advice?

I switched to a Mac more than a year ago and didn't experience many transition issues. I think the difficulty lies in whether you have any peripherals that have limited or no mac support (such as certain HP printers, or cell phones/PDAs with Windows Mobile running on them)
The best advice I could give is to research these devices ahead of time and see what kind of support they have for macs, or try to find third-party software that you can use to help. If you have any troubles you can always ask on here, it seems like there are tons of mac readers.
Also, we've used Word at home on our Macs for years and didn't have any issues printing. It may be possible that there are issues with the printer drivers, but thats merely a guess.

Aghman - duh, the printer drivers! The first place to look, didn't recall that. Thanks for the advice!

It is the printer. We have a Mac and a PC: we made sure the printer we got was Mac compatible. We use the Mac for graphing, graphics, and surfing. The person who is not fast enough to get to the Mac gets the PC. We occasionally have a little trouble going from one to the other, but not anything that you can not solve easily.

Love my mac, wouldn't go back! Got a Powerbook for personal use about 3 years ago, still using Windows at work. My main worry was unavailability of software or software glitches for the Mac but it has not been a serious concern for me, except in the case of Quicken--Intuit apparently charges banks extra to offer account data downloads to Mac, rather than just to Windows. And, I have a Quicken file that I want to convert from Windows to Mac and Intuit has it set up so that it's really difficult to do that, totally unnecessary, according to my research. I'm so happy with Mac, that I will likely drop Quicken. That pretty much sums up my experience - if there's no solution for some lame software's company's behavior such as this, there are other options.

check out this website on decluttering your desk: http://www.decluttered.com/

Ok, here's a question from a total AV novice: can I use a flatpanel cinema screen as a television? Is it possible to wire in the cable or broadband television so that the flatpanel acts like a tv?

Or is there some component to this that I'm missing?

FWIW: my current tv is a 13" with a vcr attached. Old Skool for sure!

Rachel,
You can, but you need a TV tuner. I use Miglia's TVMax (with a crappy monitor for now) to watch TV with a Mac Mini. It needs the computer to run the software and hard drive space for "streaming" the programs. Here is what I wrote about it. There are other similar products on the market that do the same, and Miglia has a full range of TV tuners. I like the TVMax because it works as a Tivo-like device as well and you can record programs while you are out.

There was also question like this before that might help you out too.

Thanks Kelly!! I'll look into that!