I suspected power supply and battery problems but last night found out the real culprit – the poor thing’s been cooking! Fan monitors showed zero RPM for the CPU fan(s).

Oh dear. The Apple Hardware Test reported hardware failure 4SNS/1/40000000: 'TC0P', so it’ll have to go to the Mac doctor soon.

In the interim, I have nursed the MacBook Pro a bit by putting it on an upturned baking tray as a heatsink and having the ceiling fan in the office on full blast.

It’s a great way to learn about other Mac software by seeing what other people use.

A bonus – you can log in using OpenID. I wouldn’t have bothered if I had to create a new online username and password.

After upgrading to the MacBook Pro I had to ditch NeoOffice because it didn’t work on Intel-powered Macs. It was also based on OOo version 1.x so it was a bit out of date. I switched to the OOo version 2 release that uses Mac’s X11.

OOo worked fine (but not very Mac-like) until last week, when it broke: it wouldn’t even start. The killer was probably Apple’s X11 update which I automatically installed (as you do…). Installing a new version of OOo and deleting OOo pref files did not fix things.

I couldn’t be bothered trawling the Net for solutions, reverting X11, etc. (the usual geeky fix-it-yourself stuff) so I took another look at NeoOffice. Lo and behold! the NeoOffice team had updated it to be based on OOo 2.x and to work on Intel Macs. A double bonus.

It is in beta but has worked fine for me so far. I can use the Command key again (As God Intended™). I have even donated money to support NeoOffice development.

1. My computer is a MacBook Pro running OS X.
2. It is running a virtual machine in Parallels Desktop.
3. The virtual machine is running Windows XP.
4. Windows has a VPN client connected to my work.
5. I am controlling my Windows 2000 PC at work using PC Anywhere.
6. My PC at work is connected to the server at work using a Microsoft Remote Desktop connection.
7. The server is a VMWare virtual guest running Windows Server 2003.

That’s three computers, five operating systems (counting VMWare ESX) and a couple of network layers (VPN to the network at work over virtual Ethernet on Parallels connected to WiFi and cable broadband).

Yes, I know that I can remote to the server direct from Windows XP in Parallels (after connecting via the VPN) but that would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it?

My overriding feeling is that I switched because Windows really annoys me. I had used and programmed Macs and PCs on and off over 15 years and was sick of the whole Windows thing. I still use Windows at work (I have no choice) but wanted a different experience at home. I’m getting into digital photography and felt the Mac would be a better match to my ‘creative side’. I also like the geeky side of Mac: it’s a Unix box under the hood and has a real scripting language built-in.

Perhaps the tipping point for me was about presentation. For example, I care about the way language looks: not only spelling and punctuation, but typography as well. (Evidence: I own a copy of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style — a beautiful book.) So I want to be able to type the correct quotes, dashes etc. in any application, not just Word and those with some kind of auto-correction. On a PC, it is a pain: at work I bother to type Alt+0145 and Alt+0146 (with leading zeros, on the numeric keypad) when I want open and close single quotes. (And it’s an extra challenge on a laptop without a numeric keypad.) On a Mac it is much easier (although not always intuitive): Option+] and Option+} (respectively) – a single, combined keystroke, not four. The folks at Apple thought of that in 1984.

I agree with a lot of Mark’s concerns about format lock-in and, luckily, have avoided them. I have stuck with cross-platform, standard apps that I used on Windows: notably Firefox and Thunderbird. I also use OpenOffice for the small amount of office-type stuff I have to do.

Could I give up what I have now and switch to Linux? A quick look at Ubuntu today (running under Parallels Desktop on my MacBook) reveals the best Linux desktop experience I have had so far. Perhaps 70% of the functionality I want is there. (Adobe Lightroom for Linux? Not likely, I fear.)

But not enough to switch yet. (How do you enter a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK in Ubuntu?)

So far, so good. It’s much faster running universal binaries, Rosetta apps run about the same speed as on the PowerBook and I love the bigger screen.

I plan to blog some of my experiences with the new machine not too long after they happen…