PC to Mac, and Back Again
[This was written in August 2008; the iMac has since been completely replaced by a second PC]
After 18 months of being a Mac guy, the limitations became too much. While still occupying a space on my desktop, it shares that space with a new PC that was placed in service on May 30.
The 20 inch Intel iMac has been relegated to being what is essentially a music server, being the central location for me to manage my 8000+ files of music and audio. I find that iTunes works better on a Mac, plus the fact that there is no longer a simple way to capture audio on a PC. The combination of Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack and Fission make audio a joy to work with on a Mac. I use audio capture to grab dialogue from DVDs and from web sites, and I edit various audio files to get rid of bits and bytes that I dislike in particular songs and sound files. This used to be easy on a PC a couple years ago with CoolEdit and Total Recorder. But Total Recorder is now much too dependent on hardware and driver configuration. I tried the entire Replay suite, and DAK’s collection, but none of the three work with my particular combination of PC hardware and software. So the iMac stays for the tunes, connected to a set of Bose Companion 5 speakers.
One severe limitation for the iMac was that I have several PC-only programs that I use regularly, including the NoteTab text editor (BBEdit isn’t even close), and IrfanView as an image viewer/converter (again, no Mac equivalent). I tried Parallels right from the iMac’s first day, but dumped it when VM Fusion became available seven months later. Fusion is a lot better than Parallels, but I grew weary of the back-and-forth program usage.
Although I upgraded the iMac’s performance with more memory, the final straw came when I outgrew the 250GB internal hard drive. All scanning projects came to a halt until a solution could be found. I gave much thought and consideration to keeping some files solely on external hard drives, but previous experience with hard drive failure points to the need for all files to be on the computer’s internal hard drive, with backups being simple mirrors of everything on the internal drive. SyncBackSE works great as a centralized backup solution. Having all files immediately available is a big plus. Everything gets backed up every night to at least two external drives, via either Firewire 800 or eSATA connections. The lack of these high-speed connections was another iMac limitation.
As for the new PC, it’s an Intel processor on an Asus motherboard, with 4GB of RAM, all inside an Antec P182 case, and running Vista Business. Lots of expansion space, and lots of cooling capacity, the two biggest limitations of the iMac. The cost was definitely not low, but was also half of what a comparable Mac Pro would have cost.
After running both programs on the iMac, Dreamweaver and Photoshop both run faster on the PC. All the scanners have PC drivers, and all is working well. All, that is, except that the iMac couldn’t talk to the PC over the wired network, or vice versa. I gave up briefly and used a USB drive to transfer the few files that I need to. A very successful solution came with the discovery of a program called Network Magic, which fixed the iMac to PC problem, and a separate problem of an XP box talking to two Vista boxes. [More about Network Magic: As I continue to use the program, I am more and more impressed. Various updates from Cisco have improved Network Magic, and it now sees all of the various bits of hardware connected to the network, both wired and wireless.]
