Big Switch Update

It’s been about a week since I made the big switch from a Windows laptop to a MacBook.  Here is a quick update for all of you who are still holdouts.

If you need Exchange integration (like I do), I can highly recommend Parallels 4.0.  As the screenshot shows, Parallel’s “Coherence” mode lets Windows apps appear like native apps in the dock.  It is also possible to associate file extensions in Finder with Windows apps, allowing me to launch Excel by double-clicking a .xls file.  The clipboard works flawlessly between Windows and native apps (as long as you remember to use ctrl- inside of Windows apps, although that might be adjustable, have not spent enough time fiddling with the settings).  Parallels can also intercept links that you encounter in Windows (e.g. in an email that I have in Outlook) and open them using a Safari or Firefox in OS X.  All in all I have found the usability of this hybrid solution to be excellent.

My only gripe is the much shorter battery life, but that was of course to be expected with 8x the RAM, a bigger screen and a much faster processor than on my previous laptop.  There also is some evidence that an SSD may actually draw more power than a regular drive and I am sure running the virtual machine doesn’t help.  What is surprising though is that configuring power management seems limited to disk sleep and screen dimming with no (obvious) ability to trade of speed for power consumption.  If anyone has any killer suggestions for reducing power consumption, please let me know.

Another minor nuisance was trying to charge my BlackBerry via USB (I do synching over the air).  When I first plugged it in, the BlackBerry complained about insufficient charging voltage.  The solution turned out to be to install PocketMac for BlackBerry, connect the BlackBerry and then uninstall PocketMac.  I didn’t want all the synching stuff since I did not need it, but as I suspected the uninstall does not remove the drivers which are needed to supply enough voltage.