Blogs are great because you can just make up words like “MAC-u-cating”, it really means duplicating.

Going Mac meant I had to duplicate my old PC working environment, it’s almost a joke to try to class a PC desktop as an actual working environment against what I now have on the Mac. This Macbook is just a dream, what a machine!.
I look at my old 15” 1024 X 768 Compaq Evo Laptop, where I spent countless hours doing everything I could on it and now the Macbook Pro 17” widescreen  1680 X 1050 display, wow there is no true comparison.

My working environment consisted of two types of set ups. My 9 – 5 and then my 24/7 freelancing environment.
> 9 – 5, required:
-    An email client (outlook at the time, now entourage)
-    Excel IE6 or IE7 (not by choice) Vodafone requires an eToken to access their systems; I’m yet to get that work in a Mac OS ☹. Plus the security certificate only seems to work on IE6 or IE7, what a pain!
-    Word
-    PDF writer and reader
> 24/7, required:
- Email client again
- PHP/HTML editor
- Every browser I could run
- FTP program
- Access to the web
- Photoshop
- Word
- Offline web server

The daily grind of my 9 -5 employment doesn’t require much computing power, the real demands were done in my free-lancing 24/7 work. That’s were the old Compaq Evo used to fall over, I guess the demands of doing everything at once just placed a big strain on it.

I have a really good set up now. Using Vmware Fusion I run Windows XP inside of the Mac OS and I can cross in and out of windows to Mac by just moving the mouse.
In the installation of the Windows OS Vmware also maps a shared folder on your mac documents so you can access your Mac files from inside windows

I use XP for some daily work stuff but mainly to run as a offline webserver and to also see how websites layout in IE7. (IE7 is a pain to work with when designing a website) 512 MB of the 2GB Mac memory is allocated to run Windows XP.

What I was looking for and what I now have is a real stable platform to work on. I spend most of my time in the Mac environment and the other testing in Windows.

Funny enough, Windows still crashes from time to time but then that’s more the windows curse that’s been put on me.