Macs, Macs, and more Macs... I'm sitting in my mom's house right now, with a Mac Powerbook Pro (my laptop), a Mac Mini (the computer I've put together for my brother), and an iMac (the computer I've put together for my mom).
This process has been quite a bit easier than I was imagining, especially for my mom. She's had a Windows computer for over 20 years now, and she had it connected to several devices (especially printer and camera) and of course had lots of software she really wanted to keep (most especially her games).
Bringing up the basic operating system was, of course, as close to trivial as you can get with these things. They're Macs, after all :) Moving 110GB of data from my mom's computer was easy, and took just a couple hours. Making the files work on the new Mac was much easier than I expected – most of them just worked. In fact, the only exception was some .wma audio files she had. I had to Google for, oh, 10 seconds or so to find a good converter for them. A few minutes later, all of them were converted to .mp3 – and they all work just fine.
I was dreading the printer. It's an older HP inkjet. I Googled around a bit and discovered that support was supposed to be built in to OS X. I tried it – just plugged in the USB – and it just worked. Then I went for the camera (a Nikon Coolpix S4300). This time I didn't even Google – just plugged in the USB cable – and the next thing I know all the photos were downloaded into Apple's Photos program.
Experiences like this are why I own nothing but Apple computers these days. Despite my IT background, I'd much rather not spend my life troubleshooting stupid compatibility issues. Moving her to a Mac was actually far easier than the last time I helped her upgrade to a new computer, when we moved from Windows to Windows.
The best news of all, though, is that my Mom isn't having much trouble with a brand new (to her) operating system. In fact, the most trouble she's had so far involved her new mouse. Both of us were laughing like maniacs over her inability to bring up a right click menu. She appeared to be doing all the right things, but the menu stubbornly refused to pop up or stay up. Then I'd try it and it would work immediately. We still haven't figured that one out :)
Her house smells really good right now. She's roasting a stuffed chicken for our dinner, and it's getting to the point where the aroma is making us all crazy. My brother Scott is arriving shortly. That chicken isn't going to last long :)
