It’s true. I’m switching to a Mac. Of course, I’ll be switching back to a PC shortly after, and then switching back to the Mac sometime later, and then back and forth - switching from Mac to PC and vice versa - for the foreseeable future.
For more than a year I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to add some Mac and OS X experience to my portfolio of PC skills. I bought a Mac Mini almost exactly a year ago, trading an older model for the most up-to-date model Apple offered at the time, with a Core 2 Duo processor and discrete Nvidia graphics. I’ve used that machine sporadically over the last year, sometimes for lengthy stretches, other times for brief experiments and simple tasks. I’ve done several reinstalls, with and without Time Machine backups, and at least one full OS upgrade along the way.
But last week I finally decided to get serious with this experiment. After a few tweaks and some careful cable-swapping, I now have 24-inch monitors lined up side by side, each running at full 1920×1200 resolution and sharing a single keyboard and mouse.
Here’s what my desktop looks like. The shared keyboard and mouse are about 21 inches in front of the dual displays and not visible here. (And yes, that is a SpongeBob Squarepants pen holder on the left side of the desk. Eat your heart out.)
- The display on the left is being driven by an HP Pavilion Elite desktop PC with an i7-920 CPU, 10GB of RAM, and an upgraded Nvidia graphics card. I bought it as a refurb from HP’s official outlet site more than 10 months ago for a mere pittance. The PC I received was new, in its original box with a factory warranty. (It cost $659, and I added about $300 worth of after-purchase upgrades). [Note: this paragraph has been updated to reflect the source of the PC.]
- The display on the right is connected to the Mac Mini. This model doesn’t include user-upgradeable memory (and I don’t feel like prying it apart to do the upgrade). I purchased it as a refurb from the Apple Outlet for $744 (it arrived in original box and was indistinguishable from a new machine). I paid another $100 for the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. It has its stock 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.
The beauty of this setup is that I’m not “switching” in the way that Apple defines this term. I’m not forswearing one way of doing things for another, not undergoing a religious conversion, not pledging allegiance to a brand identity. I’m not giving up Windows and using a Mac exclusively, or vice versa. Rather, the goal is to be comfortable enough to move between machines and use the best tools on each one with as little friction as possible.
The secret of truly being able to use these systems side by side is a free, open-source program called Synergy, which runs on both the Mac and the PC and allows the use of a single keyboard and mouse without any switching. If I drag the mouse pointer to the far right side of the PC monitor and then keep going, the pointer appears on the Mac, where I can click or double-click any object on the Mac desktop. Dragging the pointer back to the left edge of the Mac display and then beyond moves the pointer back to the PC.
It wasn’t especially easy to set up Synergy, but after a few false starts I got things working properly. On the next page, you can see what the Windows Synergy control panel and corresponding Preference Pane on the Mac look like.
