Monday, June 28, 2004

From PC to Mac

My wife's 600MHz Dell with Windows 98 has been destroying itself for maybe a year. Last week we got her a Mac laptop and spent a few days transferring things from a computer that crashed painfully and frequently.

The biggest pain came from moving email. The worst part is that the transfer was Microsoft-to-Microsoft, and it was still painful. We started with contacts organized into folders and email organized into lots of folders.

To move the mail, I set up an IMAP server on a local Linux box and used that to transfer mail folder-by-folder. I used a trick on the Linux end to create the 70+ folders in mass, but I still had to create them each individually on the Mac end. I transferred them one-by-one on both computers.

Contacts never really went well. Regardless of what I selected, the export would always give just the contacts in the top level folder. I wound up putting all the organized contacts into the top level and moving them that way. They'll have to be separated out again on the other end.

There are still some wrinkles to iron out, but the Mac has been doing very well since we got it. One thing that took me a while to notice is that the thing has no fans. It runs cool enough naturally that it doesn't need gross temperature regulation. It reminds me of those jokes I used to make about the original Pentium's natural state being self-incineration.

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