New Year, New Gadgets

Most of the data transfer was relatively straightforward -- I wrote down her Internet connection settings and her ISP's e-mail server addresses on a piece of paper, saved a copy of her IE favorites in her My Documents folder and otherwise made sure no important Word files or pictures were floating around the rest of the computer.

But then I had to deal with Outlook Express. I have now acquired a new level of dislike for this fossil of an application after spending most of one day trying to get somebody's data out of it. Outlook Express -- much like AOL, come to think of it -- does little, if anything, to help you export your user data, and in particular your e-mail messages.

But I did get it all to work in the end.

First, I had to figure out what program would yield a set of mailbox files that Apple's Mail program could easily read. That turned out to be Eudora for Windows -- once the Windows Eudora files were on the Mac, the free Eudora Mailbox Cleaner program for Mac OS X could funnel them right into Mail.

So I downloaded Eudora on the PC, installed it and let it import the OE data. That went mostly well, except that every record of whether a message had been replied to or forwarded was missing in Eudora. Since there weren't that many messages to fix -- and because I'm borderline OCD about my own e-mail -- I spent an hour or so redoing those flags in Eudora.

(If you've found a better way to move OE messages to a Mac, please let me know! This will be a great Help File column if I can ever condense this advice to 300 words or so.)

Then I turned on file-sharing on the eMachines desktop (it's kind of pathetic that it's easier to activate Windows file-sharing on a Mac than in Windows XP), browsed for the shared directories on the iBook, then copied over the data. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, after one or two hiccups, piped all the old mail data into Mail, and I could continue with the rest of the setup. I fed all the pictures into iPhoto, made sure that the Word and Excel files were set to open in AppleWorks and combined any duplicate entries in Address Book.

I also wound up changing a few system settings from the defaults, and in the course of doing that realized that I've had to make those changes on just about every Mac that I've used. In case you're about to do the same, here are my recommendations on what to adjust on a new Mac:

* Turn on the built-in firewall (System Preferences: Sharing icon: Firewall tab)

* Have OS X download important security updates in the background, then notify you when they're ready to install (System Preferences: Software Update icon)

* Change the Dashboard shortcut key from F12, which ejects CDs on the iBook and is labeled as such, to F8 (System Preferences: Dashboard & Expose)

* Remove the "Network" icon from the sidebar in Finder windows (in the Finder, Finder menu: Preferences: Sidebar icon)

* Tell Safari to block pop-up windows (in Safari, fourth item under the Safari menu)

* Show the status bar in Safari, which displays the address of the link under your cursor as well as whether it will open in a new window (in Safari, fourth item under the View menu)

* Enable tabbed browsing in Safari (in Safari, Safari menu: Preferences: Tabs icon)

* Set iTunes to rip songs from CDs in MP3 format instead of Apple's AAC (in iTunes, iTunes menu: Preferences: Advanced: Importing tab)

* Programs to install now, not later: Stuffit Expander , Windows Media Player , RealPlayer

Just in case anybody thinks I'm teeing off on Apple -- well, I sort of am. I know how this company relentlessly tweaks its software in each new release, and I'd like to see if address these points. I plan on doing the same favor for Microsoft in the near future, when I'll detail all the changes I recommend making to a Windows XP computer's Start Menu and Microsoft Word. Watch this space. ...

Questions? Comments? Send them to rob@twp.com.