Making the switch in 2days - Last minute questions (Partitions,iTunes+Mail migration)

You don't need to have different partitions for your system and your user data, as when the system fracks up, you have the choice during a new installation to "Archive and Install", which means that the old system will be put in a separate folder, which is the accessible by you.

But as I am quite good at fracking my system up, I have chosen to have my home directory (the user folder) on another partition, so that I can easily restore my system either with a reinstall or cloning my back up back to my system partition.

And you don't need to reinstall Mac OS X every year, as there is no registry to fill up like in Windows, which slows down the system. But beware, there might be some occurrences, where you need to reinstall Mac OS, but those are rather rare.

Boot Camp is an Application in the Applications > Utilities folder, with which you then create a Boot Camp partition.

Be sure to uncheck the following in the iTunes Preferences, as that option copies everything into the iTunes Music folder.




You can also choose to uncheck the option, that iTunes manages your music (track names, artists,...).

Mail (not iMail) has the option of importing Outlook and Entourage accounts if you have copied them over.





The last two screenshots are from an older version of Mac OS X.

 

I note on virtualization. I own VMware and it works pretty good but I just started using Sun's virtual box which is free and I think it is excellent.

 

Hey Basti...I switched over from PC several years back and decided to use Mail and iCal vs. Entourage. I am so glad I made that decision as my brother uses Entourage and does not seem to like it as much. If in fact you do decide to use Mail, check out http://www.littlemachines.com/. It is a great little piece of software I used to easily convert all my emails, etc. to Mail. I used this because you cannot directly copy your Outlook emails to Entourage or Mail. They use a different file format (.mbox I believe) that Windows does not use and cannot export to.

In regards to syncing, I can only speak for using Mail and iCal, but I have had absolutely NO problems syncing emails and calendar events w/ my iPhone.

Best of luck,

-ReborN

 

I've had some pretty good luck with the littlemachines product in the past--definitely recommend it. However, I recently found another product aimed to go directly from Outlook to Entourage (it exports in the RGE format) and they are currently in the beta testing phase. Nice thing about that is that it's free while in beta. Check it out.

Convert My Email: Outlook to Entourage

 

1. No need to have separate partitions for system and user. OSX does not need to be reinstalled every year (it's not windows).

2. Bootcamp can do it at any time. You need to installyour windows.

3. iTunes use the ID3 tags info. If ID3 tag is not there, then use the file name as file name. If you actually buy the music like you should, this is not a problem. Mp4 (AAC) is better than Mp3 format by the way.

4. Some people convert to thunderbird which is cross platform.

 

You can install XP with bootcamp and use Vmware Fusion with that bootcamp partition. Startup is a bit slow but it works.