Moving from Windows to the Mac, Series Part 7
Of course, when moving from Windows to OS X the new hardware and the operating system are just the first challenges that had to be faced. There are others. The first of these is peripheral hardware compatibility. For me, at least, Linux has always failed this test. OS X did much, much better. It liked my two printers, my scanner, my camera, my USB hard drive, my Firewire DVD burner, and my existing KVM switch. That was a nice surprise.
It is not, however, happy with my Linksys wireless network. From what I understand after looking around, this is a common problem with the current version of OS X. Whereas OS X may like most PC networks, it is not happy with protected wireless networks. I got the MacBook Pro to connect once to mine, but never again. It always times out before the login handshaking completes. At the moment, I am piggybacking on a neighbor's unprotected Linksys wireless, with permission. When I am in my home office, I am just connecting with a cable. This is not a problem for everyone everywhere. It is a problem with some Macs and some protected wireless networks.
Linux has similar problems with wireless. I am assuming that wireless networking is more difficult than I thought it was. Aside from setting it up, I have never worked with wireless networking, which is to say I have no detailed technical coding knowledge. My current network is a “g” and I need to upgrade to an “n” network anyway. I will probably just buy an Airport Extreme for a new router and replace all of my PC cards accordingly, which I would have had to do anyway. I will certainly do this if I can get one or more Airport users to tell me that this has worked for their PCs. :)
This does point out one more “negative” about Apple. They are not very responsive to complaints of problems, and that is putting it kindly. “Deaf” would be a better description. From all that I can tell, their support personnel are just as annoying and condescending as everyone else's. Apple is very bad at acknowledging that OS X problems exist, or at communicating a desire to correct them. In the first sentence of this paragraph, I put the word negative in quotes. That is because, although it is certainly a negative, it is no more negative in regard to Apple as it is any other vendor. Saying that computer vendor support sucks is exactly equivalent to saying that the sky is blue on nice days. They all suck.
Tomorrow: finding new software.
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