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PC to MAC...?

N

newtomacfrompc

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 1, 2009
10
0
Hi - My old Windows XP laptop has died although luckily, my hard drive is still OK.

Basically, I need a new PC but recently I've been tempted by the new all in one imacs. I have a couple of questions:

1) I'll be accessing my old laptop hard drive through a Hard drive dock with a USB port. Will the MAC recognise my old drive and allow me to easily browse to retrieve my old music / photos etc?

2) I had quite a few emails in Outlook that I'd like to retrieve and pass over if possible. Bearing in mind the way in which I'll be accessing my hard drive, will this be possible?

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
1) should be fine. If your old PC laptop was formatted using FAT32, you'll be able to read and write to it using a USB dock. If it's NTFS, you'll only be able to read from it unless you install additional software.

2) might be a bit of a mission because Outlook uses its own very proprietary format. This is not so much a PC/Mac difficulty, more a "don't have Outlook but want to read Outlook messages" difficulty. You could use VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox to set up a Windows VM in which you can install Outlook - you'd be able to read your emails fine from there. Or you could use Crossover Office and run Outlook "natively" on your Mac - I've had good success with older versions of Outlook under Crossover.

A quick Google found these guys:

http://www.techhit.com/outlook/export_import_outlook_mac.html

but never used it, so no idea how good they are.
 
newtomacfrompc said:
1) I'll be accessing my old laptop hard drive through a Hard drive dock with a USB port. Will the MAC recognise my old drive and allow me to easily browse to retrieve my old music / photos etc?
Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely.

newtomacfrompc said:
2) I had quite a few emails in Outlook that I'd like to retrieve and pass over if possible. Bearing in mind the way in which I'll be accessing my hard drive, will this be possible?
Click to expand...

I doubt that it will be so simple. First though, if you were using IMAP to access your email account, you may want to check if there are copies of your messages stored remotely. (IMAP involves synchronizing the contents of the mail program with the server rather than straight downloading.) If that doesn't work, you will probably need another PC (or Windows running on your Mac) to recover the messages into a functional version of Outlook. From there, you can export them to a Mac-friendly format.

I can't say for certain because I don't know how Outlook saves its emails to disk. That's something you'll have to investigate further.


Beat me to it. Oh well, hopefully my post isn't entirely redundant.
 
1: Fat32 will be read natively. If its not then you would need to to read NTFS.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
It requires a little reading to get working but its easy once you learn how.

2: Your contacts can be exported as .CSV

You can use this program for you emails.
http://www.techhit.com/outlook/export_import_outlook_mac.html
It will export them as .mbox which can be used in Apple Mail.

If you want help dont be afraid to email or PM me.

On a side note, avoid Office 08 like the plague. Get yourself a nice shiny copy of iWork. Entourage is buggy and slow and so is Word etc. If you want an MSN client, you can use Messenger:Mac but theres also Audim or Pidgin which are far better IMO.
 
Just a quick thought - if I find my .PST file on my old hard drive (I wont be booting up from my old hard drive) - will I be able to use it in Entourage in the first instance to get my old mails / contacts back?

Point taken re using iWork. I'll probably move over to that after I've figured out how to get my old stuff back!
 
newtomacfrompc said:
Just a quick thought - if I find my .PST file on my old hard drive (I wont be booting up from my old hard drive) - will I be able to use it in Entourage in the first instance to get my old mails / contacts back?

Point taken re using iWork. I'll probably move over to that after I've figured out how to get my old stuff back!
Click to expand...

Nope Entourage doesn't support .pst for some reason. (From memory) Just use that program on the link.

Oh Shoot, I overlooked the fact that your laptop had died...

http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/ but its not free.
 
Kebabselector said:
I've found iWork moans about virtually every Office document you load. I found NeoOffice to work better than iWork.
.
Click to expand...

Why not just recommend OpenOffice? NeoOffice and OpenOffice are practically the same. After all, they are both native to the Mac now.

as for the question the original poster had, I could have only answered one and the others clearly state that it is not a problem.
 
gotenks05 said:
Why not just recommend OpenOffice? NeoOffice and OpenOffice are practically the same. After all, they are both native to the Mac now.

as for the question the original poster had, I could have only answered one and the others clearly state that it is not a problem.
Click to expand...
Some prefer NeoOffice over OpenOffice, even in their respective 3.0 incarnations. For some users, NeoOffice gives them less trouble, I guess.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Some prefer NeoOffice over OpenOffice, even in their respective 3.0 incarnations. For some users, NeoOffice gives them less trouble, I guess.
Click to expand...


True, especially since NeoOffice has been native to the mac for a longer time, but I think OpenOffice 3 is better. My reason is that Mac OS X's grammar check is pitful and wish it were improved. Since OpenOffice does not implement the Mac's native grammar check, or even have one, I can worry less about the grammar check bring up false positives on grammar errors, which has happened to me.
 
Using an External Hard Drive (NTFS) to Mac will be fine. I did it when I went from PC to Mac a few weeks ago. I transferred files up to 2GB and I was fine.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
I know it seems silly. I think, though, that this limitation is due to Apple's reliance on open-source solutions for working with NTFS, combined with their unwillingness to anger Microsoft.
Click to expand...

From what I recall in the last keynote, Snow Leopard will support read/write to NTFS.
 
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