A technicians Point of View about Mac to Pc

7/23/12 When you are a technician, you see a lot of different situations and scenarios and you see things differently when it comes to computers. One question I get asked a lot is, which is better, mac or pc? Now that is a question that has been argued through history and has been studied by many experts and there are very different opinions. I will give you my opinion coming from a technician’s point of view. My work during the day is strictly on windows clients. All my clients work on Windows and the only apple product that is sometimes brought up is an iPhone that needs exchange email setup or someone needs help getting to the webmail on an iPad. As far as a mac computer being used for everyday work they are not really used. And I tell my clients that before they go and buy a mac, I tell them the pros and cons of the mac as it relates to doing the everyday work that my clients do in our company. Now I have some friends that I do support for and I help keep them running and occasionally they will bring me their emergencies that come up. The one that I just went through was a friend who had a pc laptop and it crashed. I came in got some files to move off it to a backup drive, but could not get the outlook files. It was determined that the hard drive had failed and a new machine was in order. This was a good choice as it was a laptop and about 4 years old and it was heavily used. My friend decided they wanted to get a mac laptop. They thought that being they used an iPad and an iPhone that a mac would be great and it would make life easy to have data and documents move between all three with ease. We both were about to find out that would not be the case. And from a techs point of view, what I started to go through setting this mac up and migrating data over, a common user could never go through it and get it working. They would either pull their hair out, curse mac out and go to their local Apple store and beat up some poor apple worker out of frustration, or they would call in an expert and pay a lot of money to get things done. So my friend gets a top of the line mac book pro, not the retina display one, as they needed it right then and the newest ones were not shipping for a week or more. I come over to help set it up. Get it connected to wireless no issues, install Microsoft office 2011 and get activated, no sweat. This will be a breeze…. I get them connected to their email accounts, they have 2 one is a personal the other is for their company. Sweet, emails are flowing in and out of the outlook! Things are looking like I’ll be out early and sipping a beer by the pool! Now we come to something that should be very simple to do but the mac version of office has the option hidden. My user wanted to set up so when they start typing an email it is set to use a font and set at a size they prefer. On the windows world, this is very easy a few clicks and it is done. On the mac side I had to go into these different options, and when I saw how it was done by referring to the help file, I thought to myself, “Did I miss something? Is this really need to be this complicated?” I get that done though and it all looks good, I had to get some files restored from a backup drive that could only be read by a windows pc so I took that with me and we setup to have me come back with the files and get them restored and archived back into outlook. About 2 weeks go by and my friend calls and says they are having some issues. I figured, no big deal, there are always some growing pains when converting from pc to mac and vice versa, it takes me a second to remember how to switch gears if I have to walk someone through something on a different platform. So we go though some issues, some are basic questions, like where is this, how do I do this, what is that? Nothing major. Then I was told that the computer is hesitating when they are working in outlook, so I remotely connect to take a look and I see it happening, it is getting stuck when trying to write and email and just pausing, you type a whole sentence and nothing happens and then it catches up and types it while you’re looking at the screen in disbelief that you just saw that! So I went through the normal steps I take to fix this, check for updates, make sure nothing unneeded is running in the background, restart the computer and try it again. Nothing works. So my friend calls apple and gets a run around, then they call Microsoft and get a run around. So then after a call to their local apple store and talking to a nice tech who is willing to listen, they were told to try to reinstall the office suite. Really??? Well ok, it should not be hard let’s make a backup of the outlook files and do that. So I went in and ran export and let it back up the email files to the doc’s folder for safe keeping. Then I find the Microsoft document on how to reinstall office. Can I reinstall just a part of the software like windows? NO! You have to reinstall the whole thing! Ok fine! I print out the sheet so I can follow along as I am doing this remotely and it will be easier than trying to juggle 2 windows around. The document I printed, is 6 sheets long! I start reading it to prepare. Step one, force quit all apps. Step 2 delete the application folder from the hard drive, step 3 go into library folder and delete the plist files for office…. Wait what? I know what I am looking at and what I have to do to make this uninstall, but for a common user, there is no Way they will want to even attempt this! And it got worse. Every step got more complex just to remove this program! Then one of the steps, told you how to go and save your files that are stored in the Microsoft folder in the documents folder, and how it should be moved to the desktop so the emails and settings for outlook are not disturbed. So I go through this entire document follow the steps to the letter. We restart, and now need to reinstall office. Put cd in follow the prompts, activate, all done, ready to go! Open word, looks great, even kept the settings for the font size, COOL! Go to open outlook, sorry this identity cannot be opened in this version of outlook! Ummmm what???? Holy crap, did I miss something? Did I delete something bad? Oh no what now? A simple Google search turned up the answer, simply make sure you run Microsoft updates to get the versions all straight, then when it’s updated the outlook identity will rebuild itself and open. But to an average user... would they know to look at that and find it on Google? Perhaps if they have the knowhow to research problems a try to fix them, but as I thought of my friend who I was doing this for, they would not have been able to do that. They would have been a little freaked out if I was not on the other end of the phone. I was quite surprised at the amount of steps that we had to go through to get the applications back in working order, and the entire ordeal my friend has gone through getting setup and working on the mac. If I had known that this would have been such a learning curve for my friend or the growing pains they would go through to get used to the mac, I might have pushed harder for them to go to another PC. And from my point of view as a technician, there seems to be quite a few things that are not as easy to do on the mac that they were on the PC. The next time someone asks me what they should go with, my first question will be “What kind of applications do you run now?”