Big Mac Weekend

Well, it's going to be a big Mac weekend this weekend. First, I'm going to enjoy the rest of the week at home as July 4th falls on a Wednesday and so I'm going to make a nice 5-day weekend out of it. Ahhh... But that's not all. Oh no.

Yesterday my daughter accidentally dropped her Gateway laptop and really fractured the display - it's kind of neat, in an artistic way. It's an accident, and it gives me the opportunity to move her off Windows onto a MacBook. This is great as I had more than a few problems with the WiFi card in her laptop. The drivers were more than 3 years old and no newer drivers existed and the ones that were on the box weren't very good. If she shut the lid it would not reconnect to the access point when she opened it again. She got good at manually reconnecting it, but there's a better way, I know.

Also, my wife is using a little nicer Gateway laptop that she's comfortable with but it's still more maintenance than I would like - face it, I have to do this all day long, I shouldn't have to deal with it when I go home. That's no reason to replace it, but my son really deserves a laptop for all his hard work on grades this year, so we're going to hand down this guy to him and get my wife a new MacBook.

Then there's the Mac Mini that's going to be fixed in a few days that we'll be picking up from the Apple Store. Add to that a big external drive and a couple of cron jobs to the laptops and we have a reasonable back-up plan that means that we're not going to loose anything. Whew! What a massive Mac weekend!

I've got to get all my daughter's stuff of her Windows laptop and converted to the Mac, but then she can use iMovie/iDVD to put her movies together which she now has to do on the Mac Mini. Also, the web building software on her Windows box is OK, but iWeb is as good or better and that will publish to a web server in my office and so she can convert her stuff as she has time and energy and get moved to iWeb. Other than that, it's Firefox and Gimp - which I'll move her to Photoshop Elements. In the end, she'll be much happier and I'll be free from the support that I've had to do up until now.

My wife's machine will be the most difficult because she gets things like Word and Excel docs, and there's no viewers for the Mac, so it'll probably have to mean that we get Office. Could be worse. But she's got years of email in Outlook Express and I need to convert every single email for her - plus contacts. It's got to be done right or she's going to be very upset. After that, I think it'll be easy because other than web, email, and Office, she's pretty easy to keep going.

My son will want to get some PC games, and that's OK as he wasn't as keen on the Mac as a PC simply because of the games. Now that he knows about Boot Camp he wants a MacBook, but he's going to have to wait a bit. This windows laptop will be fine for him for a while.

So, between all the machines that need to be set-up, accounts moved, data shifted around, backup scripts written and scheduled, connectivity checked... it's going to be a Big Mac Weekend. I can't wait.


UPDATE: turns out, my wife wanted to get a 15-inch Black MacBook, but since those aren't made, she decided that the 13-inch screen on the MacBooks was just too small for her. So she decided to keep her Gateway laptop - for now. But we got two white MacBooks for the older kids and I spent the time getting them set up and going with their iTunes files and accounts on the new machines. They love them, and the only thing I really need to do is to get some backup solution written. Nothing fancy - maybe rdist from the laptops to the Mini and then a complete nightly backup of the Mini to the external HD. Don't know, but I'll work it out.