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Western CO | Ray, we sort of have the opposite -- pretty much converted to Macs but I have one leftover desktop running XP and my wife has a Toshiba laptop running Vista. The macs will play easily with the PC network. Your pc's will show up on the mac and it can copy and move files over the network very straightforward. I've not tried printing to a network of PC's but the other way works well. We have our printers hooked up to an iMac. The easiest way to make a PC print on a Mac network is to download "bonjour" from Apple. It may also be helpful in making it work the other way -- I don't remember.
As far as opening files and working with them back and forth it works fine -- the only problem is the versions may not be in sync. Office for Mac is slightly different (Mac look and feel) but pretty much the same functionality and features. Ironically even textedit on the Mac knows how to open a word file, while notepad cannot anymore.
I'm sold on Mac's as well -- personally I like them much better for my daily things, email, web, word proc. etc. If I need to run things like SMS I will run them with VMware Fusion or Parallels. We have a copy of both, although I don't have the latest version of Parallels so I can't give a proper comparison. I got the copy of Fusion for my iMac and have used it more so I'm more familiar with it. The guest OS will occupy a partition on the drive and you can move files back and forth similar to on your network. You can simply open a windows program in a window under Mac OS and do your work there while still being able to access everything on the Mac. I would suggest not skimping on RAM if you want to do this -- the more the merrier when you basically have two OS's running at once.
HTH's -- | |
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any advice for mixed households? (pc and mac)
