Ah yes, the restarts

OK, this is unfair, but I'll say it anyway. While I'm certain my new work PC will be running Windows 7, my ThinkPad that I have at home is still running XP. And this evening I have restarted it about 6 times, and I'm sure I will restart it several more times.

I'll admit that Windows 7 may not suffer from the same number of restarts, and I'll also admit that I'm doing a fairly low-level thing. I installed Paragon HFS+, software that is supposed to give me the ability to read an HFS+ drive from Windows. It sort of worked, because I could browse through the files hierarchy. But it didn't matter, because all of the files were zero bytes... or at least they appeared to be.

That problem forced me into another piece of software, which I haven't tried yet. It's called MacDrive, but it does the exact same thing: it's for Windows users to be able to mount and use an HFS-formatted drive. One promising thing about MacDrive is that they specifically mention Time Machine drives as something it handles. One concern that I had about Paragon HFS+ was that there was something in particular about the Time Machine drive that it couldn't hack.

Anyway, when you're installing and uninstalling software that works at this level, I guess you have to expect some restarts. So I'll stop complaining about that now.

My Piano Problem

To continue the introduction, I'm also a recreational piano player. I love playing the piano, and I use my Mac to do it. I have a nice USB MIDI keyboard, with 88 weighted keys, and I plug it into my Mac, and use two nice pieces of software to play it. One is GarageBand, and the other is a lovely piano application that I found in the Mac App Store. Neither works on Windows, of course.

Today I had my first success. I found a product called Mixcraft, from a company called Acoustica. They make what seems to be the closest thing to GarageBand for Windows. I plugged it into my PC (oh yeah, I do have a PC laptop that I picked up refurbished on Woot a few weeks ago). It worked right out of the box with my keyboard. The latency was not good, but the website had some instructions on how you can tweak the buffer settings to get the right balance between quality and latency. I was also happily surprised to see the abundance of really nice sounds that the software has built in. And the price tag is nice too. You can demo it, but it only costs $79 or so to buy it. So this crisis was averted. The piano sound is not quite as nice, but this will tide me over for now, and I might end up liking this better, because it supports VST instruments, which GarageBand does not. So that means I can eventually buy the nicest software piano available -- particularly when I get the work laptop, which is sure to have smokin' hardware specs.

Now it's time for me to work on the second challenge... reading an HFS+ drive from Windows.

The Beginning

Tomorrow is my last day at my job, and I will turn in my gorgeous, unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro, having been a Mac user since shortly after OS X came out, about 10 years ago.

A week from tomorrow, I will start my new job, and I will be given my new Windows laptop. I will be working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. I am excited about the job, but about switching from Mac to Windows, I am scared.

Why am I scared? Because the Mac is where I'm comfortable. It's where I'm productive. And I'm going to have to get as productive and comfortable as I have been on the Mac.

I'm also scared because I've been here before. I once switched from Windows to Mac. That time it was on my own dime. I dropped $2000 on a new PowerBook and then, of course, had to learn to be productive on it. The difference between then and now, though, is that OS X was a very new platform. The operating system didn't perform very well and there wasn't a lot of software available for it. Switching from Mac to Windows 7 will not have that problem.

And it's not like I've never used Windows before. I'm functional in Windows. But I'm not as comfortable, or as productive, as I have become on the Mac. This is partially because of things like knowing where the keys are and being familiar with the feel of the hardware. But it's also partially because -- well, I'm a Unix guy.

Apple made a brilliant move by switching to a Unix-based operating system. Many thousands of geeks like myself switched from their attempts to run a Linux-based desktop or laptop and found a new level of productivity and comfort. I am one of those. I switch between my lovely user-focused Mac applications and the Terminal, where I find true greek success.

So this blog is where I plan to document the journey. Lots of people switch from Windows to Mac. That's not a story. But seldom does an extremely satisfied Mac user leave the platform to return to Windows.

I'll answer one question: Why not just buy my own Mac? Well, I technically own three Macs right now. One of them is decent, one of them is completely disassembled (it was my first), and the third one is really on its last legs. The decent one has some sort of video card issue that I have yet to troubleshoot. I might figure out what's wrong with it and start using that at home, and I might end up just buying a new MacBook pro. But first, I need to try Windows for a while.

Here's the main issue: Even if I buy a Mac for myself to use at home, I am definitely going to be using Windows at work. And work is where I need to be most comfortable and most productive. And if I'm living in the Mac world at home and only using Windows at the office, I could perhaps become resentful of my Windows life and, therefore, my job... and that would be bad. In order to become comfortable and productive on my work machine, I need to make sure that's all I use -- at least for a while. I need to give it the old "college try," and then I can make a decision about whether I want to use a Mac at home or not.

Oh, one final point. Tomorrow I'm not only turning in my Mac. I'm also turning in my iPhone :) Can you believe it? Now I wish I had turned it in a long time ago and gotten a personal iPhone. My wife and kids all have iPhones. But as long as I had one that work was paying for, it was easy to just keep it. Well tomorrow it gets hard. Because I will be without an iPhone and without a Mac.

I'll do a final backup of the iPhone onto the Mac, and then do a final Time Machine backup of the Mac onto my personal (thank goodness) backup drive. And of course, the backup drive is formatted with the HFS+ filesystem, which (of course) cannot be read by Windows, by default... which brings me to my first challenge. Getting Windows to be able to read an HFS+ drive. If I can't solve that problem, I will have to make a copy of all of the data (or at least the stuff I'll need right away) onto an NTFS-formatted drive, preferably before I turn in the Mac... in which case, what the heck am I blogging for, when I should be copying files like mad?