New to the orchard (unless you count an Apple IIe in the early 80's) Picked up a mid '14 15" MBP - 2.5G/16G/500G SSD El Capitan at a good price as new condition and only 68 cycles on the battery. I am currently crawling up the learning curve. I have set up the Mac side with Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and Carbon Copy. After installing the latest Parallels, I loaded the PC VM with XP Pro (I shall not access the 'net from there), Quicken 2004 and Dragon Naturally Speaking. Various external bits are connected through a Satechi 7 port powered USB3 hub. I have two printers, a Canon MX870 multi function unit via my wireless Lan and an ancient HP 4P laser via USB.
The speed of the MBP is astounding (my yardstick is my Windows box, a HP Z600 with dual quad core Xeon processors but a conventional HDD) and the screen resolution lets me work as comfortably as with the Dell 19" Precision monitor on the HP.
Both systems "see" both printers (more on that later), the built-in microphones work very well with Dragon and it only took me half a day of fiddling to transfer my Thunderbird settings and message archives to the MBP version. I am planning to load Microsoft Outlook on the PC side. I only use it as an address book and calendar and see no reason to switch.
Something I miss - perhaps it is one of the learning curve issues but I still find the Explorer function in XP to be a better way to see everything on a computer. There may be a Mac equivalent but I have not found it yet.
The failure: Although the scan functions of the MX870 function perfectly under El Capitan, the print menu is rudimentary - no access to the Canon feature set - duplex, quad, print quality, paper source etc.
Any suggestion?
Thanks
The speed of the MBP is astounding (my yardstick is my Windows box, a HP Z600 with dual quad core Xeon processors but a conventional HDD) and the screen resolution lets me work as comfortably as with the Dell 19" Precision monitor on the HP.
Both systems "see" both printers (more on that later), the built-in microphones work very well with Dragon and it only took me half a day of fiddling to transfer my Thunderbird settings and message archives to the MBP version. I am planning to load Microsoft Outlook on the PC side. I only use it as an address book and calendar and see no reason to switch.
Something I miss - perhaps it is one of the learning curve issues but I still find the Explorer function in XP to be a better way to see everything on a computer. There may be a Mac equivalent but I have not found it yet.
The failure: Although the scan functions of the MX870 function perfectly under El Capitan, the print menu is rudimentary - no access to the Canon feature set - duplex, quad, print quality, paper source etc.
Any suggestion?
Thanks