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I live my life strewn across two computing platforms. By day I live in the Windows world (happily I might add) and usually at night I am hanging out on one of my Macs. So that leaves me with a unique perspective to share with you. I know what my commonly used and favorite applications and what their counterparts would be for your new Mac. I also know of a few unique to Mac applications that you might just fall in love with. If Santa Claus left a shiny new Apple computer under your tree, read on:

Now your Mac came with iLife, and the applications are really cool. iPhoto is great, Garageband is loads of fun and you will get a lot of mileage out of iMovie but there is more free software than what came from Apple. One quick tip before we get there is that if you DO use iMovie a lot, you will find that many people actually prefer the old version of iMovie, HD 6. You can get the old version for free from Apple to test it out for yourself.

So while we are on the multimedia topic. As good as GarageBand is, it’s not a Swiss Army audio editor. The odds are after you deck out your new computer with ridiculously expensive extras from the Cash Incinerator, I mean Apple Store, you won’t have the money to pick up an expensive audio editor, so check out Audacity. Audacity is a great, simple Audio tool available for Mac, PC and Linux. For all your quick conversion and editing needs, it can’t be beat. Download Audacity here.

Now you probably either already had, or got lucky enough to get a shiny iPod with your Mac. But you don’t want to buy all of your movies on iTunes do you? I mean you already have plenty of DVDs that you might want to rip on there. Download Handbrake and you can rip DVDs to any format you could possibly want.

Now that you are creating all of this cool media on your computer, you might just find you need it somewhere else. There’s one problem, you don’t want to blow $100 a year for Mobile.me. Let’s go somewhere you might never expect…MICROSOFT! Microsoft Live Mesh is a fantastic tool for remote file syncing. You can set the folders you want synced and then have access to those files from the web. It has a great feature set for Mac, PC and Windows Mobile. Learn more and sign up here.

Now iChat is cool, but not everyone is on AOL. Get in touch with all of our Microsoft Messenger buddies with Microsoft Messenger for Mac. What’s that? You have friends on every conceivable service? Download Adium, it supports chatting on every protocol you can imagine. Except IRC…..get your IRC on with Colloquy.

Now that we are in the old school world of IRC, you might also be one of those geeks that needs to FTP stuff from time to time. You just can’t beat Cyberduck for FTP transfer on a Mac.

Now as much as you love iPhoto, you want to share your photos with your friends on Flickr right? Get Flickr’s Uploadr tool and transfer your files to the service quick and painlessly.

Are you using your GPS to Geotag those photos? Run them through GPSPhotoLinker first to get your GPS data into the meta-data before you upload lickety split.

Now this one I don’t really have a metaphor for, but I can tell you that I would DIE if I couldn’t use this application anymore. One thing that Macs just aren’t quite as good at is finding your applications. Sure spotlight is an awesome way to locate your files and stuff, but it’s not the most intuitive way to load Photoshop. You don’t want every application on your Dock. What if you just hit a key, started typing the name till you saw the icon and hit enter. BAM! Enter Quicksilver. This program may take some getting used to for some, but it’s something I just couldn’t live without these days.

One last thing to grab. You will find the Mac world is quite different from Windows when it comes to video formats, and Windows Media video is all OVER the web. Download VLC to get all of your video playing smoothly on your Mac.

Last but not least, Safari? No thanks, download Firefox. While you are at it, if you get disenchanted with Mail.app, Thunderbird is a kick ass mail client by the folks at Mozilla.

Now there are plenty more awesome free applications and lots of them are great. I wanted to list the cool ones that I use daily. Enjoy!

Last weekend I walked a tightrope. I was probably the most nervous working on a computer I have ever been. I gathered my courage and undertook the most dangerous of all upgrades, the Macbook Pro hard drive replacement.

My Macbook Pro has been suffering with an anemic 120GB Hard Disk for quite some time. Now 120GB on a notebook shouldn’t be that anemic right? After formatting and such it’s really only about 112GB, and after a full install of the OS, Photoshop CS, Final Cut Express, iLife, Office 2008, Logic Studio and a few dozen other various applications, I was sitting with about 16GB of free space.

I had decided to give VMware 2 Beta 2 a shot, and knew something had to give. It would be pointless to start a VMware with Windows Vista with 16GB of space.

The Hardware
Luck was in my favor last Sunday. After a strike out at Best Buy, Office Depot had a Seagate Momentus 250GB SATA drive on sale for $89. That was just what I was looking for and I took it home following a short trip to Radio Shack to get the prerequisite T6 Torx screwdriver that is required for the upgrade.

Also required to complete the task successfully, was the hard drive converter I purchased a few weeks ago at Fry’s. The Apricorn Drivewire is not only a very slick device, but it makes this whole process totally easy. This slick device allows you to connect a 3.5" IDE, 3.5" SATA, 2.5" IDE or 2.5" SATA (What the Macbook Pro Uses) Hard Drive to your computer via USB 2.0, without having to use an external case. With this device I am able to transfer data among hard drives without having to constantly crack external enclosures and swap things around to get things done.

The Software
Many people will tell you that to pull this off you need software like SuperDuper or the like. I am here to tell you, there really is no need for such software, everything you need is built into OS X, both Tiger and Leopard and even earlier I am betting. It’s called Disk Utility. I’ll tell you more about that in the process.

The Process
Dismantling the Macbook Pro is no easy task. You will need a small, and I mean very small Phillips screwdriver, jewelers size, as well as a T6 Torx screwdriver and by some accounts a spludger. I didn’t have the spludger and all went well for me so I am thinking that is optional.

First of all, either use a second laptop, or print the directions from iFixit. The Hard Drive Replacement guide is thorough and all I needed for my operation.

To make my life easier, I took a piece of poster board I had handy, and I drew circles each time I moved to a new section of the laptop, labeled the circle something like "right side of case" and I placed the screws in that circle. That way every screw went right back where it came from.

I removed all 30 or so screws, including the four, you count em, 4 T6 screws that you need the Torx screwdriver for, and replaced the hard drive empty. I did not make an attempt to backup the drive or move the OS contents until after the hardware upgrade was complete.

With the new drive in place, I reassembled the case, twice. Why twice? Somehow in the process I bent the top of the DVD slit slightly and it wouldn’t close just right, I re-opened it, bent it back, and it closed up perfect the second time.

With the hard part finished, I started the process of restoring my OS to the drive. I connected the old drive to the Drivewire device mentioned earlier, and booted the computer with the OS X install DVD. When time came to install the OS, I instead chose utilities from the top menu, and selected "Disk Utility", on the restore tab, I was able to select the new 250GB drive as the target and the old 120GB as the source. In about an hour total, it had formatted the new drive to the Journaled OS file system and restored the entire OS, all my software, settings and data to the new drive. I removed the DVD, rebooted the system and my desktop loaded as if I had never touched it. Talk about easy!

Bootcamp
I decided I wanted this set up a certain way. I wanted Windows Vista Home Premium installed on a 50GB Bootcamp partition, and I wanted to be able to access it from Mac OS X via VMware Fusion if I needed to.

I used the Bootcamp Utility to set up the partition and begin the Windows installation. After a few hours I had it up, all drivers set up, all the software and updates I wanted and I was ready to boot back into OS X.

VMware
I would say setting up VMware to read the Bootcamp partition is easy, but that might be making it more complicated than it is. If VMware detects a Bootcamp partition, it shows up as an OS in your VMware system list. You boot it, it runs, installs the drivers it needs and prompts you to install the VMware tools. Done deal.

The Aftermath
I now say that my Macbook Pro has a split personality. The list of software installed is formidable. In addition to the earlier listed load of Mac apps, I also have all that’s included with Vista, as well as Visual Studio Professional, Expression Studio 2, Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and the suite of Live apps I love including Windows Live writer that I am using to write this post right now.

Now my daily life I spent in OS X, chatting, mail, browsing the web and the like. My more serious work I do in Vista, that is development, blogging, etc.

I would venture to say that given this site’s general topic of OS Agnostic computing, I know more than most the arguments for and against these two titan operating systems. The arguments against Vista are legendary. I have made no secret of the fact that I started carrying a Macbook Pro in September of last year. With the exception of using VmWare Fusion sometimes at work, it has truly lived as a Mac. It shipped with Tiger and was upgraded to Leopard as soon as it was available. Still, I have never strayed from my Windows roots. I used a Windows XP desktop machine regularly at home and these days I have two Vista powerhouses side by side at home. My laptop still runs Leopard and I have added an iMac into the mix that runs Leopard also, but I still remain divided right down the middle in my personal computing world, two Macs and two PCs. I might just give someone a headache to think about how this works, but for me, it’s computing Nirvana.

I think it’s important to dissect each computer’s purpose and see how it lends itself to a particular operating system. I think this first exercise might just lend some light to this dubious setup:

1. Macbook Pro Laptop: (2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 120GB HD, nVidia GeForce 8600m) This laptop is hands down my favorite laptop I have ever owned. To quantify that, this is laptop number 10. I have been a card carrying, or laptop carrying, geek since I was in the 10th grade. I am not kidding, we are talking monochrome plasma screen, DOS and a 5 1/4" floppy drive. It probably weighed 10lbs. These days, it’s a svelte Macbook Pro, 15.4" display, thin and light, fast as hell and it runs OS X Leopard. I use it for mobile photo work, email, chatting, browsing the web and the like. It’s just a keep me connected while I am away machine. I have a PC laptop Microsoft provides that does the work duty while I am mobile, and I keep my laptop free to play and have fun. Steve Jobs can cringe, but I would hardly consider an Apple laptop if it was my primary business laptop, that is unless my primary business was graphics, audio or video. Not that one couldn’t survive on one (or boot Vista on it for that matter, but this is about OS X) I just don’t think it would be a practical machine. That being said, I have never loved a laptop more.
2. Home Built Vista Ultimate 32-bit Desktop: (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, 400GB & 120GB HD’s, nVidia GeForce 8400 GS) This machine is a week new. I say a week new because I replaced all of the guts in this machine last week. This has nothing to do with the OS, but I hardly think I could have revived a waning iMac for $340 and literally replaced every component but the case, power supply and DVD drive. In a way it does have everything to do with the OS though. Windows Vista is flexible. It doesn’t require Steve Jobs approved hardware. It will run on nearly anything. I bought a box of parts, put them together, turned it on and installed Vista without incident. I am writing this blog on it and so far this machine is fast, stabile and a dream to use. This is the machine I use for development work, including maintaining this site. I also sometimes do some light graphics work on it, manage all of my email, and browse the web and communicate with friends. This box has been my general purpose computer for five years. I think it cost me about $2,000 to build in 2003, and now another $340 and it’s better than any machine I could have bought at the local PC retailers for three times as much. I know, I looked.
3. HP Vista Ultimate 64-bit Desktop: (2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 350GB HD, nVidia GeForce 8800 GT) This machine is arguably the most under utilized machine in this house. It’s fast, has gobs of ram and a big ass 24" monitor. I use it for photo work from time to time, watch TV and movies on it, and most of the time I just plink around on it when my other box is busy. They side side by side in my office and it gets maybe 20% of the overall use. It screams through Photoshop and given some of the upgrades I gave it, it plays games fantastically well. It has 4GB of Ram, a Core 2 Duo processor and a nVidia GeForce 8800 GT video card. It’s a true screamer and to me it’s just a fun machine to play with. I am sure someday I will come up with something useful to use it for regularly, but for now it’s kind of the Tim Allen machine, you know, the one that makes you grunt when you use it.
4. 24" iMac Desktop: (2.13Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, 250GB HD, nVidia 7300 GT) I bought this computer for the sole purpose of doing music work with it. It excels at that task well and has now also picked up some video work. This computer gets the least use of any in the arsenal, but when it does, it never gets in my way, it’s rock solid and Logic Express is a dream to use. It’s connected to a variety of audio hardware and it never gives me a minute’s trouble. I would possibly use this machine for more if I didn’t already have several others. I have intentionally left certain applications off of it so I am not tempted to garbage it up full of stuff I could too easily use on other computers that already have that software.

Now one might ask why the hell have all these computers, couldn’t I have gotten one big ass computer and done all of this stuff on it? Yea, possibly I could have. But that’s just not how I work. Without having a business to pay the ridiculous cost of a Mac Pro or a high end Workstation computer, I buy these on my budget. I also like the ability to dedicate a machine to a particular task, like compressing video or playing a game, and still be able to browse the web about the game or work on something else while one is crunching away.

The entire point to this article is simple. With all that information I just threw out there, I use Windows and OS X simultaneously. Never am I on one when I am saying to myself "Man, I wish this had x on it." I think they both have their own strengths and weaknesses, but neither are so strong or so weak as to make a clear winner. And one last note to leave on, don’t let anyone tell you that Vista is crazy buggy, slow or hard to use. I gave up Windows XP for Vista officially last week, and not once have I wished otherwise. This machine runs it exceptionally well, it’s rock solid and I have no complaints.

I recently got the HTC Mogul phone and service from Sprint. I had been using it sporadically as a network device via Bluetooth on the Macbook Pro in OS X 10.5 Leopard but had not tried it tethered in Windows Vista Ultimate in Bootcamp. I decided to try it USB so I wasn’t marrying the device to the same notebook twice, and I cannot be more pleased with the results.

I didn’t have to touch a single disc. I plugged it in via USB, selected "Internet sharing" on the phone via USB and plugged it in. The laptop chugged for about 30 seconds installing drivers and blam, I was online. Ok, maybe not blam, I did have to turn off WiFi for the browser to recognize the connection, but once I had done that I was set. As a matter of fact this is the 3rd time I have used it that way and I am writing and posting this blog via a cell connection.

I wish I could get it working USB on OS X, has anyone managed that? While wireless is nice, Bluetooth decimates the battery, I would much rather have it use my laptop’s battery.

I decided to give Windows Vista Ultimate under OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Bootcamp option one more shot. This also includes integration with VMWare’s Fusion for my particular setup. The machine in question is a relatively new Macbook Pro laptop. It’s got a 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 4 GB of Ram and a 120 GB hard disk. I had tried this once before with less than stellar results, but after reading about one of my contacts on Pownce trying it, I decided to use my spare time this Saturday to give it one more shot.

I started by deleting my current Windows Vista VMWare virtual machine and then began the process of setting up Bootcamp. Lucky for me this time went much smoother with the Bootcamp Assistant. It created the 32 GB Partition very quickly and before I knew it I was rebooted into Windows Vista’s installer and was on my way.

The Windows Vista installer, as in all of my previous experience is quick and simple. I don’t have metrics to back it up, but I am almost positive that Windows Vista Ultimate installs faster than Windows 95 did. That’s not too bad for an install that takes up a whopping 10 GB when it’s finished. All in all the install itself takes about 15 minutes.

I only wish that the updates were as fast. Right off the bat I had 44 updates to install. That process took about an hour to complete. Of course that is Internet speed dependant but I wouldn’t consider ours to be slow per the average.

The Apple Bootcamp installer went without fail this time. I was pretty sure that this was the exact reason I had troubles the first time. Oddly enough, the one really annoying problem I had before was that I could not get Vista to assign the laptop a Windows Experience Index score. This time it went without a hitch and I am humming along with a Windows Vista Experience Index of 4.5. The 4.5 is brought down by the hard disk performance specifically, with 3 GB of ram (don’t ask me why Vista won’t see all 4 GB) gave me a 5.1 on memory and the 256 MB GeForce graphics chimed in a speedy 5.9. Pretty respectable scores for a portable computer.

After I had set up the 3rd party applications and anti-virus software I wanted to use, I booted back into OS X to get it set back up in VMWare Fusion again. This wasn’t nearly as straight forward as it could be. Although I had removed the VM partition, the boot camp one was still right where it should be. The only problem was it was showing the old boot camp partition I had created and would not actually boot. There is a good tip here…

Removing the machine from the VMWare Virtual Machine Library is not enough, you have to also delete a Bootcamp file so that the machine will start fresh setting up the Bootcamp virtual machine again. That file is:

Users{yourid}LibraryApplication SupportVMware FusionVirtual MachinesBoot Camp%2Fdev%2Fdisk0Boot Camp Partition

After you have deleted this file, close VMWare Fusion if it’s open, then re-open it. After a few seconds "Boot Camp partition" should appear in the Virtual Machine Library and you can start the setup again. It will boot Windows Vista (or whatever OS you have installed via Bootcamp) and then once it loads it will start installing the VMWare Tools for you. After this is complete you will be set!

Now that I have it set up this way I am quite pleased with the outcome. When I am running in Bootcamp I have a blazing fast Vista machine. When I am in OS X, I can easily read the OS files via the new Vista HD icon on my desktop (If you want to change the name of the Vista partition, simply change it in Windows and it will be changed in OS X) or I can open the machine via VMWare Fusion and use it. When in Fusion I lose Aero and there is an obvious performance loss, but I am writing this blog in Windows Live Writer via VMWare Fusion right now and it’s running along just fine.

A few last thoughts
Why Apple can’t get tap-to-click working in the Bootcamp OS makes no sense to me. The touchpad obviously supports it and every Windows laptop I have ever had supported it also so I know the OS does too. Multi touch obviously works because you can hold two fingers on the touchpad and click the button for a right-click.

I have to say this makes for quite the versatile machine. I can do pretty much anything I could ever need to with this laptop now. In case you didn’t back track through the links on this article, I started with running Windows XP in Parallels. I could not get Windows Vista to install in Parallels. I decided to switch to VMWare Fusion and I could not be happier with it.