Mac mini - six things they did not tell you about switching from PC to Macintosh

Last November, after my PC died for about the 4th time I knew there was something seriously wrong, probably something odd happening with the motherboard. I thought I'd treat myself to something different so I splashed out on a Mac mini (Core Duo).

Tip: If you are buying a Mac from Apple, consider the cost of memory upgrades. I would have opted for a 2GB Mac mini rather than the standard 1GB version but they wanted £80 for the privilege. The actual memory cost from Crucial.com is £32 and when I sold my old memory on eBay for £12 I realized I had saved myself £60!

Mostly it's worked as promised but the following painful annoyances rather caught me out:

1. Parallels did not come as standard, something I really needed for running some of my old windows applications. My only other option would have been to reserve a major chunk of my hard disk and use dual booting, something that I've had real issues with in the past. I took a trial copy of Parallels and it works fairly well apart from being too slow. In fact so slow that in January I upgraded the memory (to 2GB), though as I'm techie enough to do this myself it was under 30 quid.


2. Webcam did not work. This has been a headache. Not only did my Philips USB webcam not work, there are no valid drivers to make it work (I wasted hours trying to get a generic driver to work). Even worse, there are no guarantees that any other cheap camera I can find will actually work. I still don't have a replacement webcam.


3. Scanner did not work. I have a rather expensive Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. Unfortunately there are no drivers that will make it work natively in Leopard. I eventually got it running under Windows 2000 in Parallels, hardly ideal.


4. EVE Online does not work. I tried out a free account with EVE Online (a well known and popular multi-player game for the Mac), sadly it doesn't run reliably on the Mac mini and freezes up randomly.


5. Can't network with a PC. This is particularly annoying. I've been trying for several weeks to get this working. I have worked through inbuilt help and googled for solutions to no avail. I can get my Mac to recognize my home networked PC and even read/write files to its hard disk but not the reverse. I wanted this to work as I'm using a 500GB USB drive as my Time Machine and I've kept space on it for PC backups but as the Mac remains invisible to the PC my archive/backup process is frustratingly manual and I can't share a central file library.


6. Can't use my microphone/headphone. This was not made clear in the summary specification and is a really stupid design flaw. The audio-in socket is actually only for digital microphones. This means that my headphone microphones will not work (though confusingly they fit the socket and it took me quite a while to find out this was not some sort of driver problem). Consequently since buying the Mac I have not been able to use Skype, a real problem as I use this as my home office number. I have been searching for a second-hand iMic device (they're a bit pricey new), a USB adaptor for microphones, I should be able to find one for under £15. The alternative would have been to get a bluetooth microphone, but I can't bear having yet another device to keep charged up.