I've been helping people move to Mac for quite some time. It's part of the process of consulting. I've rarely found anyone who regretted it or felt they wanted to return to the Dark Side. As a Mac consultant of course I'm biased towards Macintosh. I recognize the value in PC's and the utility they hold on many levels. As a technician, I simply prefer technology that behaves in ways I find predictable, understandable, and rewarding to use. For me, that's a Mac. Your mileage may vary.
Helping people remotely to solve problems on their systems is part of most if not all computer consultants' toolkit these days. It's simply too convenient to pass up. Rather than drive your fossil fuel burning contraption down the freeway, or pedal your bike if you are feeling a lot of gumption, you fire up one of many remote control applications and run the remote Mac or PC from your desktop. It's remarkably easy to do and there are many fine tools to accomplish this.
One of my favorites is Teamviewer.
So, for today's adventure, I assisted a client to move from their PC laptop to their new Mac laptop and did all this on the phone and via remote control using Teamviewer. First we set up the Mac to her liking. Installed Open Office and Virtual Box (virtual computer software), configured preferences and she learned some tricks and tips about her new machine.
We set up the virtual PC inside of Virtual Box so she could run Quickbooks, which meant installing Windows XP with antivirus and updates in the virtual machine environment with file sharing to OS X.
Overnight she installed Quickbooks in the virtual Windows XP.
Then we got logged into her PC and copied her data onto an external HD. Plug it into the Mac and 'pop' there is the disk. Copy her Quickbooks files over into virtual XP and Quickbooks was happy to unpack them and open them.
Copy her iTunes library from the PC into the Music folder and 'pop', iTunes was happy to recognize all the music and playlists.
Copy her photos into iPhoto.
Tweak things a bit. Format two volumes on the external drive for Mac OS X native GUID boot format, set up Carbon Copy Cloner for duplicates to one volume, and Time Machine for archiving backup to the other volume.
All in all one of the most productive sessions I can remember and completely done from my home with a client some 500 miles away. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is.
