One just isn't enough

Macs seem to be like buses. You don't see one for ages, then two turn up in less than 6 months!

Our home PC has been driving us nuts for some time and last weekend my wife and I had enough. A quick trip over to our local PC World and after browsing the new PCs my wife spotted an iMac. That was it. The simplicity of it, combined with the stunning display had sold it to her. 

As a concession I also bought Microsoft Office for the Mac to make life easier for her and the kids to get the hang of the new Mac environment. In fact, as the home and student edition comes with three user licenses I could install it on the MacBook too, but I just like keeping anything Microsoft off it! Open Office still does everything I need to do.

As it turned out, MS Office wasn't all that user-friendly at all. I spent the weekend trying to get Entourage (the Mac equivalent of Outlook) to pick up emails from several sources and just got stuck on one - all sorts of daft error messages. I then had a go with Apple Mail (Apple's equivalent of Outlook Express that comes with the Mac OS installation) and it worked first time!

The beauty of the iMac is that it starts up in seconds unlike the old PC which sometimes doesn't doesn't seem to start up properly at all - that is to say it appears to start up, but half an hour later still nothing will respond to a mouse click or keyboard command, while the hard disk continues to thrash away! So it's just a matter of backing up all the documents and photos onto my external hard drive and working out how to archive all the old Outlook Express emails on the old PC before we finally transfer 100% to the iMac.