Keeping the doctor away

Wed 23rd

On Monday my Dell laptop was misbehaving so badly I gave up. After rebooting multiple times I decided that I wasn't going to be very productive unless I did something and that something was to get a new computer.

Fortunately I had already started thinking along those lines and after talking to Mark last week decided I might as well get an Apple Macbook Pro. As I have always been a PC user this was a decided change in outlook.

I was originally looking at the 15" model but wanted the higher resolution screen. These are not usually kept on stock and this was going to be a buy today and get it running. At best buy they had the 17" version and after making sure it fitted into my laptop case I decide to go with that. However they did not have a full version of Windows 7 (only updates) so I had to got to the nearby Office Max to get one. I just went for the pro version rather than the Ultimate on my Dell.

I then went back, bought the Mac, a connector for a VGA screen and a case to put my dell hard drive in just in case that was the only way to read it.

The setting up of the Windows partition was fairly painless and it now boots by default to Windows, but with the option of booting to the Mac OS as well.

I also had to reinstall all my software and of course all my installation disks were at home. Howver Mark had the full set required for getting back up for TAD development which was the critical requirement and they were all in file form rather than on disk. He put them on their ftp site so I could download them. I still had all my serial numbers and licence codes.


By the end of the day I had got Delphi and all the add ons installed, debug the library settings etc and was back doing some work. I had also set up email, etc


Ironically, one of the guys I play golf with in China was encouraging me to lease a Mac and develop some iphone apps. Perhaps I will do that later.


Of course I still had to get all my other files etc over. The TAD stuff I did using a thumb drive but that would have been a terribly slow process for the full set of files. Tony offered me a usb hard disk yesterday but I didn't take it.

I lookup some info on the net and it implied I could connect my 2 PCs with an Ethernet cable and copy from the Dell to the Mac. I did this for 1 folder but then found I couldn't copy it to the PC drive. My third call to the Apple help confirmed this problem - the PC disk was read only from the Mac OS.


I hadn't had dinner so I headed to the office to see if I could get in and get Tony's hard drive. Fortunately some one was there as I didn't have a key, although my swipe car was working. After I got back I move some more folders from Dell to Mac using it.


Then I noticed I could see the Mac disk from the Windows screen and lo and behold could copy files.

I then rebooted to Mac and started copying the folder sto the Mac hard disk. This was very quick for smaller ones and I went to bed with it copying music and pictures, so it was all there this morning. I then rebooted to Windows and drag them to the PC disk. Now This PC is more or less fully loaded.

Other things have started turning up at last. My golf rangefinder and my new camera arrived yesterday. The rangefinder is a direct replacement of the old one which was only 8 months old and IMHO better than the ones available in the shops. The camera is a later version in the same series as the one that was damaged.

Needless to say all this is unexpected expense and my credit cards are taking a hammering, in addition to the anticipated car rentals, meals and soon enough hotel bills.