Chris Cooper responds to Time for an Upgrade – PC or Mac. Apparently, I helped him make the switch:

I read your recent post “Time for an Upgrade: PC or Mac?” and I figured that my switching to Mac story might be of some use to Peter. I am a freshman in college, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. During the summer, I began thinking about switching to Mac from PC, in my case an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows XP. During my info search, I discovered your videos. To put it simply, they pushed me over the edge. I purchased a 20″ iMac the day that Leopard was released.

Since it was the middle of the quarter, I was forced to dive into the world of OS X and to start working right away. At the time I had a physics lab class, led by an overzealous lab instructor, who insisted on writing macro after macro for our excel and word lab-report templates. I was concerned that I would have compatibility issues if I used these templates on my Mac. I can’t comment on iWork, since I did not invest the time into learning how to use it, but Microsoft Office 2003 worked flawlessly. I actually preferred using the Mac version to the Windows version. I’ve also found that NeoOffice is superb, and best of all, completely free. Another great thing about OSX is that it has a built in dictionary, which is a very nice touch and useful in many situations.

In regards to web browsing, Safari offers and excellent experience. It is compatible with most sites, but Firefox is still a necessity in this situation. The tech guy at the Apple Store explained Safari’s superiority. I don’t know if any of the things he said were true, but it is definitely easy to use, and I even prefer it to Firefox.

Gaming is an interesting topic when it comes to OS X, and it remains one of the key points in the anti-Mac arsenal. After I set up my Mac, I immediately installed Windows XP (not Vista!) using Bootcamp. Although it is possible to make mistakes, the installation is relatively painless and a lot easier than I thought. While I could not run Steam, an essential program for many gamers, in OS X, it ran perfectly on the XP side of my iMac. While I did have a problem with pixel runs (white dots floating across the screen) for a few days, I was surprised to find that Apple promptly released an update that completely resolved this issue. Funny enough, I have played a lot of CoD2 in Bootcamp, and it runs perfectly on maxed out graphics settings. I would definitely recommend getting the better of the two graphics cards packaged with the new iMacs, because it offers twice the memory and improved performance. While the graphics cards in the new iMacs are not superior, they definitely get the job done. I’m a big World of Warcraft player, and I was surprised to find that it ran natively in OSX, and all of my interface addons worked perfectly. The game runs very smoothly on the highest settings and the graphics are beautiful.

Unfortunately, many of the games that are re-released for Mac are extremely buggy, according to many of the game reviews I have seen; however, game compatibility is really not an issue, considering Windows is very easy to run on the new Apple computers. In a way, you have to look at an Apple computer as a cross operating system computer. It is fair to say that an Apple can run any software. Apple is definitely promoting the growth of virtual machines, with other software available for OSX, such as Parallels. I have found compatibility to be a much smaller issue than I had previously thought.

I’m not sure about Peter’s peripherals, but I have had no problem with using my printer in OS X. I plugged it in and nothing happened. I was expecting an install box to appear, or at least a driver updater, but nothing happened. I tried to print a page and it printed. I didn’t have to install a thing, or search for a single driver.

The iMac altogether is quite an accomplishment. The screen is beautiful, and I’ve come to see the glossy screen as an improvement, rather than a setback. I’ve used the remote far more than I thought I would, and my new iMac has quickly become a media center, more than I could ever say about my old laptop.

Is buying a Mac going to change your life? The answer is, of course, no, but it will make your like a tad bit more enjoyable. It’s hard to look at OS X without looking at the Apple computer altogether; they were built for each other. This cannot be said about other computers, and there is something to be seen in that. I could go more into the features of Leopard, but I’m sure that any review site could offer this information, and I’ve already written far too much. I can definitely say that I understand what all the fuss is about when it comes to Macs and OS X.

So, are you switching soon – if you haven’t already? Or are you playing the part of PC, encouraging friends to stick with what they’ve been used to for all these years?

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