Just some more Mac stuff..

Anand Lal Shimpi is a very savvy guy with a popular hardware site, who's been blogging his switch to a Mac. I'm just posting this morsel as a correction to a common misunderstanding—I'll have it up my sleeve the next time someone tells me Macs won't work on a Windows network....

...I realized today that I hadn't touched on network interaction between Macs and PCs yet so let's talk about that. Networking was horrible under desktop PC OSes until Windows 2000/XP, but now we've all been spoiled with networking that just works. This directly corresponded to my expectations when I tried networking the G5 with the rest of my PC-ridden home network. OS X's Windows file sharing is made courtesy of samba, and although I've heard many criticisms about samba - under OS X it just works. I didn't bother burning any of my old documents, music, etc... off my old PC, instead I relied entirely on OS X's ability to see my PC's shared folders to get my much needed files onto the G5. As you can probably guess, if things hadn't gone smoothly my first blog would have been a much more complaint-oriented one :) I don't know why this impresses me, but the fact all of the 6 PCs I've got on this network right now can be seen by the G5 (and vice versa) is something I definitely appreciate. Gone are the days when Macs and PCs didn't like to cooperate, it truly is a harmonious hardware home here.

I bought a HP Laserjet 4000 years ago, and it's served me well. The problem is that it's a parallel port model and the G5 has no legacy ports: what a great test for Windows printer sharing under OS X :) OS X had no problems finding the printer on my network and I've been using it ever since. Drivers were already available on OS X, making the process as painless as possible. Now onto CD burning and imaging...

Printer sharing under OS-X still amazes me, though I've been using it for several years now.

Posted by John Weidner at February 29, 2004 10:08 AM | TrackBack