All..for what ?
A very very subjective answer, but my computer related productivity has increased as a result. I have used a combination of Mac's and PC's for many years, and it was about a year ago that I made an exclusive decision between one and the other. The reason for making the decision was a new laptop delivered with Vista. For my particular uses, the OS had just ballooned and (initially) didn't work well. I have always preferred the Linux/Mac OS for its filing system and general robustness, so I started porting applications and data.
First I changed the hardware; desktops, laptops and HTPC’s. My main servers were Linux, so they stayed as was. iMac for desktops, MacBook and MacBookPro’s for laptops, and Mac Mini’s for HTTP. The first stage of migration was just hardware. Each of the Mac’s was loaded with WinXP SP2. Not even BootCamp, just a clean install of Windows. The next stage was to load MacOS, install BootCamp and use the machines with dual booting. This was a learning curve, allowing each particular type of user to go back to WinXp if necessary. The next stage was to remove the XP partition from BootCamp and use Parallels. And lastly, to migrate the few remaining apps from Parallels and remove that too.
The project included my immediate & extended family. As inevitably, I am the single point of hardware and software support, I did it for everyone as a planned migration. In four households there are some 20 Macs happily doing well…
My own MacBookPro is the last remaining machine with Parallels. I use this primarily for MC. Running, testing and playing with lots of new releases is really easy with virtual machine software. The virtual space can be rolled back, copied, archived etc. There are some other applications that I keep (but rarely use); Nokia phone updater, Internet Explorer (for those times that the Add-Ins are IE specific), and Suunto D9 logging.
The change in support for the extended family is easy to measure; the age group of users ranges from 86 to 12. The older generation need far less help. The kids work it out for themselves. The 25-45 group have the most problems as they still use Windows at work. My life is definitely easier(!)
There were some specific questions about Parallels so please do start separate topics and I will try to help…