Support Question
Sent: Thu Jan 17 10:14:18 2008
Subject: Buying a Mac
Dear AINEO Support Team,
I am thinking about purchasing a laptop for home use and the occasional trip and wondered about getting a Mac. I know you use both and thought you would have a good perspective on the pros and cons of getting one. Basically I would like to use it for the following:
1. Accessing e-mail and the internet. For e-mail I would like to use VPN technology rather than webmail as I get far too much spam to use Webmail.
2. Moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files back and forth between my Mac and the office PC/server.
3. Working on a blog/website.
4. Using when I travel both domestically and internationally.
Would appreciate any advice/suggestions you might have. Saw the MacBook Air and though probably not available soon it looked wonderful.
Best,
AINEO Response
From: AINEO Support Team
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 3:57 PM
To: AINEO Friend and Client
Subject: RE: Buying a Mac
Dear AINEO Fan,
Just being a bit BQF here.
In general Mac are the best machines for home. They are great with digital pictures, music, movies, and even the stuff you normally do at work like email and web browsing. You can use the mail application fine with Exchange. I am running on Exchange 2000, but can see all my spam without using any Microsoft application.
There are some applications that I want to run on Windows. I have an extra XP license so I run Office 2003 on XP and VPN into my office using a virtual installation of Windows. I can bring my Mac Book to the office and run the virtual XP and run like I am working on a PC. We have to buy a license to Parallels which is about $70 USD.
If you plan to be mobile then you would want to confirm that you’ve got a slot in that new mac for some type of wireless card. We standardize on bMobile at AINEO but eMobile is also nice (just 80,000 yen more per year). bMobile is on Willcom so it is fine for email but not for someone who gets a lot of huge attachments.
You can VPN with the Mac as well. I have set it up, but not managed how to get to our shared drives.
iWork is a very nice application to run on OSX instead of Microsoft’s office. We just started using that and can operate on windows user related stuff. It is cost effective, easy to use, and can do more without spending 5 times the price for Microsoft’s overloaded Office product.
As for the blog, I think a blog is a great idea. Some personal blogs we have using WordPress are
<a-hrwww.joinex.org
WordPress makes the computer type (or operating systems in this case) basically irrelevant.
For hosting I am using Bluehost. They have pretty good service, are cost effective and don’t allow porn on their servers which we respect. At the time of this writing they seem to be a bit overwhelmed. I am sure they’ll get over it soon enough.
Getting used to a MAC may initially take a bit of time if you are a PC user. Everything is very logical.
If you want to go that way, I think it is a good choice from what you have described. Once you get it, we can book 1-2 hours and give you a feel for how things work. For example, I spent thirty minutes trying to figure out the “mail” in 2003, now I don’t understand why Outlook can’t be more intuitive.
I think that does it. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
Sincerely,
AINEO Networks Support