Experimenting with the Leopard in Mac

Recently, for my research work, I obtained access to a powerful black coloured Macbook with the following specs:

* OS: Mac OS X 10.5.3 (code named "Leopard")
* 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 4GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB
* 250GB Serial ATA drive @ 5400 rpm
* Superdrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* Keyboard/Mac OS
* Country Kit
* AirPort Extreme built-in
* Bluetooth 2.0 built-in


I have always been a great fan of Mac, but never used it on a long term basis. I was scared to fully convert/migrate to Mac from Windows because of worries that it will be difficult to use, in particular with one-button mouse, and that a steep learning curve will be involved. With the arrival of the new Intel Chip based Macs and the new Mac OS X Leopard, this scenario has now changed for me (i guess for other Windows users too).

To make the transition easier, one can now easily convert the Mac machine into a dual boot system (Mac and Windows) by installing Windows OS (such as Vista) using the bootcamp assistant provided by Leopard. In addition, one can use Parallels Desktop (www.parallels.com/) to run Windows in a virtual environment, while running Leopard. A cool feature of Parallels is the "Coherence" option that allows users to run Windows OS seamlessly with Leopard in one unified desktop - you will view Windows applications directly on Leopard's desktop instead of inside the virtual machine's window.

I spent some time experimenting with Leopard, bootcamp and Parallels; had some problems initially, but now they all have been resolved, largely thanks to Google. I will post separately on some these problems so that others wanting to do the same can learn from my mistakes. One of the most important lessons I learned is that in Mac, things are so simple that they end up being non-obvious. I guess maybe because I have become so accustomed to Windows that I got used to not expecting simple protocols. Another important lesson learned is that Mac's single button "cool" mouse can actually be configured to behave like a dual button mouse (click on the left for left-click and right for right-click) and do many more fantastic stuff - no wonder they call it "Mighty Mouse".

Summarizing my experience so far - I don't think I can fully abandon Windows, even if I wanted to. Both Mac and Windows have their own pros and cons, and i think I am better off utilizing both.