The user-friendly, intuitive and solid Mac OS felt like a great relieve after years of struggling with Windows XP. In combination with the sexy design of the Air I could show off with my nerdiness for the first time in my life. Took some time for me to get used to that.

Unfortunately I was the only switcher

While I was all happy with my shiny new MacBook Air, all of my colleagues were still working in a windows environment. Being enthusiastic with my Mac I believed that everything should be Mac, no matter what. That lasted for exactly 3 days… Working with Office for Mac was a complete disaster, although I was able to read my mail via IMAP, using any Calendar features on the Exchange was out of my league and sharing files on the network was a pain, let’s not mention building Excel spreadsheets.

There I was, very proud, but way behind on my todo-list and inbox.

After those first 3 days I went through all stages of integrating a Mac in our network, let’s sum up some stuff I tried:

• Microsoft Entourage; I could connect to the Exchange server but Entourage was to sluggish for normal productivity, besides the lack of features
• Create network shares using Thursby’s Dave; Did work fine until I found out I didn’t really needed it
• Crossover for Mac; I managed to get Outlook 2004 and Excel & Word 2004 running, but after time the 25th crash that day begins to bother you
• Virtual machine with VMWare Fusion; Quite ok, but after a rude Windows blue screen I decided this one didn’t either helped to improve my productivity
• Virtual machine with  Sun’s Virtualbox; Never managed to get it installed
• OpenOffice and NEOoffice for working with Office documents; Not bad, but too many compatibility problems with original Office documents
• Remote desktop connection (RDC); Used Office on a secondary desktop to which I connected by RDC
• Google calendar and Plaxo for syncing my Exchange calendar with iCal and iPhone; worked quite nice, but due to different timezones all my friends’ birthdays are set one day early… Hey, at least I’m never too late for the party.

Exploring all these options cost me a lot of free time, frustration and weakend my initial love for the Mac. Next to that, I stopped explaining to other people what I was trying to achieve. There is a point where you just get laughed at too often.

Current setup

One of my strenghts is that I don’t give up very fast, at the same time that’s also my shortcoming. This time I’ll look at it as a strenght. Cause finally I managed to fully enjoy my Mac but being very productive in a Windows environment as well.

What’s the trick? Well, no tricks at all. After I decided to completely reinstall my Mac OX, I also created a partition for Bootcamp. Setting up Bootcamp went pretty fast and installing Windows XP was peanuts. Running XP on a Mac feels strange, but works amazingly well.

But because I’m addicted to the Mac I couldn’t live with a shiny MacBook Air running only windows XP. So, for the second time I installed Parallels Desktop (had already bought it the first time, didn’t work well then). The renewed acquintance was not love at second sight immediately, but after making some configuration changes (increase video memory, use only 1 CPU, adjusted performance settings, etc..), XP in Parallels started running better and better. The last adjustments I made that really made a difference were screen settings in Windows XP to avoid shadow, fluent scrolling, etc.. All features that you could do without very easy. Together with the Parallels coherence mode, XP works almost seamingly in the Mac environment.

So for my day to day work I run XP in Parallels in Mac. When I really need to do some powerfull stuff on my Mac I switch of Parallels. When I need to get all out of XP, I switch to Bootcamp.

This setup currently works great for me, at least until I’m getting bored and want some improvement again…

With this trial and error way of working (mostly error), I must say I became quite experienced in inegrating Windows into Mac, so if I could help someone and save him/her a lot of time, please let me know.

It’s official, this is really my first post on my own weblog. Allthough I guess I’m the only one reading this post for the first few months, it does feel like a milestone.

I’ll try to keep you updated on all that’s keeping me busy in my personal life. For all that don’t know me, let’s summarize what has got my interest, in random order:

• My wife Lonneke; we’ve got married this April;
• The company I work for and partly own: Tribal Internet Marketing;
• My MacBook Air; this piece of hard- and software has really changed my online life;
• Online Marketing and SEO; It’s more a hobby than a job;
• My iPhone; no I don’t have the 3G yet, but still love the “old” version;
• Management issues; I’m the manager of 20+ online marketing specialists and will share with you what I run into managing all those great people;
• Soccer; I’m an active soccer player myself and like to support the team of the city I live in: Nec Nijmegen (yes, everyone has it’s weakness)
• And everything else I run into and want to share with you all…

So, hope to see you back here some time, or follow me on all change on the right.

Cheers!

Heini