Back in July I told you about my experience helping a friend set up her new Apple iMac. I talked a lot about the hardware end of the deal. I described the iMacs’s all-in-one, computer-built-into-the-widescreen-display styling. I gushed over the ease with which the iMac’s wired and wireless networking instantly connected to my friend’s home network.

But, alas, I didn’t tell you the whole story. After her new iMac was up and running, the greater challenge loomed – how to convert her entire computing “life” from Windows 98 (AARGH!) to Mac OS X. In other words, how to move her important data from the PC to the Mac and get it into a position where she could pick up where she left off.

Although she didn’t use Quicken or listen to music on her computer, my friend was pretty much your run-of-the-mill PC user (except smarter, evident in her decision to get an iMac). Here’s what my friend used her PC for. Email and address book through Outlook Express. Web browsing with Internet Exploder, er, I mean, Explorer. Correspondence and newsletter creation with Microsoft Word. Some special fonts she used on newsletters. A few Excel spreadsheets with some kind of financial gobblety-goop on them (I don’t do spreadsheets, or financial gobblety-goop for that matter. But, I digress). A few hundred photos, some from her digital camera, some from others.

The first step was figuring out a way to move data files from the PC to the Mac. To save time, we settled on a trusty 128 MB flash-RAM USB-based key-fob doo-hickey. Unfortunately, although her PC had USB ports, it had no driver for our particular brand of doo-hickey, so we spent 15 minutes downloading and installing the driver on her PC. Do I need to mention that the doo-hickey was immediately and calmly recognized by the iMac? I didn’t think so.

Next we prepared her data files for transportation. Word and Excel documents, fonts, Internet Explorer Favorites, and photos went into folders. From the address book section of Outlook Express, I selected all her contacts and drug them into a folder. They became individual vCard files (an almost universal format). I drug the email messages in her “InBox” and “Sent” mailboxes into folders, where they were converted to .eml files (a not-so-universal format).

We then ferried everything over to the iMac via the doo-hickey. Word and Excel documents went into the “Documents” folder (duh). I dropped her fonts into the iMac’s FontBook application and they were installed on the system. I opened the iMac’s excellent Safari web browser, and dropped her Internet Explorer favorites into the Bookmark manager. Then I literally just dropped her image files onto the iPhoto icon in the dock, and iPhoto opened and imported them. I did the same thing with her vCards – dropped them on the Address Book icon in the iMacs’s Dock and the application opened and imported them.

Getting all her email messages (including attachments) moved over was complicated only because she decided to use Apple’s Mail program rather than Microsoft’s Entourage (think Outlook for the Mac). Entourage would easily receive her email messages in the .eml format – Apple’s Mail would not. No problem! We simply imported her email into Entourage (part of the free 30-day Microsoft Office for Mac demo installed on all new iMacs). Since Apple’s Mail has the built-in capability to import email from Entourage, we then did just that. All the attached photos and documents made it through unscathed. Sweet.

All that was left was to configure Apple Mail to send/receive email. So I asked, “What’s your Suscom password?” What? You didn’t write it down? AARGH!

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski