How to Switch Between PC and Mac?

Have you ever thought to switch from PC to Mac or from Mac to PC? Maybe this is a long shot, but not impossible. After reading this article, you can switch between PC and Mac in only a few steps.

1. Switch from PC to Mac

If you have any proficiency at all with Windows, it's more about unlearning old ways of doing things. The devil, however, is in the details. The Mac differences, while plentiful, should be easy to overcome, so don't fret, because we've got you covered.

First thing you need to do is backup all your important files for transfer. Luckily the days of file formats working on one OS platform and not the other are long behind us. Your video, pictures, music, and documents should make the switch-over without issue.

If you're already using a backup and synchronize service like Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity or even Apple's own Mobile Me on your Windows PC, they have Mac clients as well. You can get your important data transferred instantly that way. Unless you have a lot of files, then it won't be very instantaneous.

Of course, a massive collection of files could also be transferred to external storage, from a USB flash drive on up to a multi-terabyte NAS on your network. Either should be equally accessible from your new Mac when attached to your home network. (Let's not even go the route of backup to a CD or DVD, or that whole direct-cable-connection stuff. Spend a few bucks on a router if you don't have one, it'll make all the difference to network your computers and no one should be using a broadband Internet connection without one).

Better yet, just convert over entirely to using a Web-based email like Gmail or YahooMail, and then you can access your messages anywhere. There's even a complicated way to get your Outlook file into Gmail. Below, we go into special detail on dealing with that most annoying and necessary of programs to transfer: iTunes.

2. Switch from Mac to PC

The reasons to make the switch are plentiful, and they are same reasons that so many stay with the PC in the first place.

Price: Mac's are almost uniformly more expensive, by several hundred dollars, for the equivalent power you'd get in a PC. This also goes for buying add-ons like hard-drives and memory; the ecosystem of options for Windows is plentiful, and that competition keeps prices lower.

Software: The amount of software you can get for Windows is enormous compared to what you can buy or download for the Mac, giving you just that many more options to get things done.

Build Your Own: If you wanted to buy the individual pieces to make your own computer—even a laptop in limited cases—you can. Making a Mac is not quite as easy, though you could always try to make a Hackintosh, which is Mac OS running on a non-Apple-supported PC.

Games: Like software, you'll find the most and the best computer games on the PC, not the Mac. (Though, arguably, they both pale in comparison to an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Get the former, and it will also work very smoothly with your Windows 7 PC.)

Microsoft Office: Like it or not, Microsoft's productivity software is the best there is, the most popular, and very likely to be required knowledge in some way. Using it on the PC is still the best way to learn it, know it, and live it.

Internet Explorer: While it's harder to defend it as a power-player Web browser, there was a time when IE was the absolute number one most used browser. And it happened as the Web was becoming mainstream. That means many Web sites and tools were made to work best in IE, and those hold-outs may be why your Mac browsers (even Firefox and Chrome) don't always display certain things correctly. You may need IE more than you want it.

You may also need to transfer music, videos, photos etc from your iPod to computer, here we recommend you iPod to Computer Transfer, which is a multifunctional tool to help you transfer files between iPod/iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad etc to computer.