Skip to content

4 Months After Switching Over From Windows To A Mac

February 13, 2010

Surprisingly, the transition from a Windows to a Mac wasn’t as jarring as I had thought, and it turned out to be pretty uneventful. It’s been 4 months since I bought my Macbook Pro, and the overall experience’s fantastic, save for 2 cases.

1. Windows-only Applications

I deal with Windows-only applications that do not have alternatives on the Mac, and the only way to run these is in a virtualised Windows environment on my Mac (I use VMWare for this). Problem is, it’s equivalent to running 2 systems on one machine, and I don’t like the performance hit that I’m taking because of this. One workaround that I use is to connect to my Windows server (I have a VPS that I use from Vodien), so all my processing is handled there.

2. Kernel Panics

I have NO idea why, but I’m getting kernel panics on my Mac. It’s annoying as heck, especially since I’m used to never ever shutting down my computer. I find it such a huge disruption in my workflow that I have to have everything reset when the computer boots up from scratch. Oh, and I like to call it BSOD – not Blue Screen of Death, but Beautiful Screen Of Death. Still a BSOD, still annoyingly infruriating. For the Mac though, the BSOD gently slides in from the top, and presents to you a multi-lingual description of what you must do (namely, reboot).

bsod windows mac

I checked the RAM on this Macbook Pro by running the memory test on extended loops (5 loops, no errors found), TechTools didn’t find anything, but then I suddenly had the haunch to try Disk Utility, and -gasp- I found disk errors. It’s something to do with invalid file counts and volume records. Doesn’t sound like something that would cause kernel panics, but I’m hoping badly that it is, and that I’ve seen the last of the kernel panics.

mac osx disk utility

So I fixed the disk errors by booting up with my Mac Snow Leopard Install DVD and running Disk Utility off it to repair the errors. If you need to do this too, just put in your DVD, and restart your computer while holding down the “c” button until you’re brought to the Mac OSX installation screen. Instead of hitting continue, just go to Utilities in the top menu bar.

I’m not sure if these disk errors are the root cause of all my kernel panics, but I’ll be monitoring this closely – hopefully I don’t get the BSOD anymore.

Related Posts.