As of about 7pm last night, I turned a corner in my hobbiyist life. I turned off my laptop, and for the first time in close to a decade, I no longer have a Windows box running.

I have made the switch to the iMac, and have enough things running there to handle my world — email, browsing, etc. I also turned off the gargantuan Linux server, having replaced it with a little Shuttle box, but that’s really smaller news by comparison.

So what have I observed in this migration?

Well, the Apple keyboard and mice are atrocious. Smushy keys and no scroller wheel…. well, let’s just say I’m off to Best Buy this morning to buy replacements.

Upgrading the memory in the machine was a piece of cake, and the instructions included with the iMac were dead on accurate. Very cool. The one thing I didn’t see mentioned anywhere, except in a tech note from Apple, was that mismatched types of memory cause a degradation in DIMM to DIMM performance. That would’ve saved me an extra trip to CompUSA to buy a matching 1Gb DIMM!

I don’t like the included mail client. I haven’t yet figured out how to do subfolders and rules. The Smart Mailbox appears to only be a filter for the things in the Inbox, and doesn’t seem to give the kind of functionality I’m used to with Outlook folders and rules. The mail client does a pretty good of figuring out junkmail though. That’s cool. Now if I can just figure out how to import my Outlook mail….

Last night we went to Borders to get a book or two on OS X Tiger, to try to help me get over the hump — perhaps a “So You’ve Moved from Windows…” book. Nada. In fact, most of the small Apple section was filled with books on Jaguar and Panther, and without knowing how far different Tiger was, I was hesitant to buy books for the older OS. And it’s then that the enormity of the Microsoft sections hit me — rows and rows of books on XP and other Microsoft products. I feel the long missing crazy-man-on-a-hill voice coming on…. the same one I heard when I was such an OS/2 zealot in the mid-90s.

This time though, it’s about more than just the architecture — it’s also about my usage. The iMac supposedly will do more and better photoediting than I’ve seen with my Windows boxen. That is what I’m looking forward to, and now that all the migrations are complete, I can play with that today! 🙂