Barry Smyth’s Blog

Having made my second PC to Mac transition back in 2006 I have decided that I would share a few programs that helped my transition period:

• Instant Messaging - Best one I found was Adium, you can add just about ANY IM account to this including Facebook & Skype
• FTP - Tested a few over the years but by far the best is Transmit
• DVD Ripping - Never had much luck with this and usually went back to the PC for this until I discovered WinX DVD Ripper for Mac
  • This rips DVD into a variety of file formats and I ripped quite a few movies a few weeks ago for my trip to the US last week
• Password Reminder - 1Password was the best I could find and it allowed me to upload my old list of sites and passwords from my PC
• Bit Torrent Downloader - Azureus seemed to be the best one
• Back to PC - Still not sure, both VMware and Parallels are shaky.

So there is a small list, hope it helps.

In a bid to separate the Home Mac (Mac Mini 1.4ghz PowerPC G4) & the Work Mac (Mac Book Pro 2.2 Ghz Intel Dual Core) completly I need to either spend a fortune upgrading my Mac Mini or simply up gun the Hard Drive, so i decided to research what sort of HD I needed and went out and bought one.

So I now have a Western Digital 250 GB drive to replace the old 80gb drive that came with the Mini when I bought it of Ebay a two years ago. On top of the extra space I’ll end up with a speed boost as well, the old drive was a 4200rpm & the new one is 5400rpm, so win win.

That’s the easy part done, now I have to install the mother and Apple do not make this process easy, they would much prefer that you go to a shiny Apple store and have your purchase your HD upgrade and install from them at a whopping $500, could almost buy a new mac for that.