As I’ve been telling all of you for the past few weeks, I am finally making the change from being primarily a Windows user to a Mac user. While the process has been fairly painless, there has been a hiccup here or there, and this week I hit a doozy.

On Monday the 4th, I finally moved the Windows monitor out of the primary desk position and moved the iMac over. That day being a holiday seemed to make sense as it would allow me a day to get comfortable with it before starting a full work day.  The first thing I noticed is while a 27-inch monitor is great to look at, it’s a heck of a lot of real estate to transverse with a mouse.  So, using a combination of the Magic Trackpad and the Microsoft mouse I planned to use, I’ve figured ut a pretty good system for getting around the screen.  (Trackpad for distance and simple tasks, mouse for tasks that require accuracy.)  I don’t blame the Mac OS for this issue, it’s just part of dealing with a screen of this size.

Tuesday started off well with no issues, and I was able to do all of my usual work without any issues.  (Note to Adobe: Why in the world does Photoshop hide the desktop on Windows, but it doesn’t on the Mac?  I constantly click out of the program by accident.)  However, towards the end of the day I was on a conference call where I needed to send someone a document, and I couldn’t.  The Mac was totally locked up.  I sent it from another computer and started trying to figure out the issue after the call.  I could get the Force Quit window to open, but I couldn’t click on anything with either the mouse or the Trackpad.

I called AppleCare and they ran me through a bunch of different things to try.  We would reboot, it would work … then lockup.  We tried other things with the same result.  They wanted me to go to an Apple Store, but seeing as the closest is 180 miles away, that wasn’t happening.  They wondered if was my third-party apps, but I told them the exact same apps run on the MacBook Air I use for work/travel, and it has never had an issue.  They finally told me to reinstall the operating system, which, as a 25 year PC user, struck fear in my heart, but with the Mac OS it doesn’t mean reinstalling anything.  Huzzah!  I did it, the system ran, I shut down and went home for the night.

Tuesday morning I decide to come in early in case anything was wrong again.  Yep, it was locking up again.  Back to AppleCare I went.  This guy ran me through a bunch of stuff, issues persisted and I was beginning to think I was going to switch back to my Windows machine.  Finally we got it to boot without issues and we ended the call.

Now, here’s where all my computer experience comes in.  I decided to reboot again, and … lockdown.  Back to the phone I went.

This time I got an older sounding gentleman, and he read over the history of the case, and he goes, “What device are you using for a mouse?”  I told him the Microsoft mouse and the Magic Trackpad.  He told me to unplug the mouse and turn off the Trackpad.  And at that point I mention that if needed, I still had the Magic Mouse laying on my desk if he wanted me to try that.

• Him: “… are the other things off?”
• Me: “Yes … and, whoa … the Magic Mouse is working, it’s no longer locked up.”
• Him: “Pull the batteries from the Magic Mouse, plug your mouse back in and turn the Magic Trackpad on and then reboot.”
• (After doing all that) Me: “It’s not locked up.”
• Him: “Even though you weren’t using the Magic Mouse it was talking to the iMac and confusing it.”

After telling him everything the other two had me do, he just chuckled and said he believed in K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple, Stupid).  And I have to agree.  I haven’t had one issue since he had me pull those batteries out.

Now, admittedly, I never told the other two about the Magic Mouse, but they also never asked me about my devices either.  All told, tech support guy #3 took less than 5 minutes from start to end, and he did have the leg up of seeing what the other two had done, but my gut tells me he still would have taken only five minutes from start to end.  There is certainly something to be said for age in situations like this.

Otherwise the week has gone swimmingly, although it is taking some getting used.  For instance, changing where my thumb goes for Copy and Paste keyboard shortcuts is driving me batty.  Command-C and Command-V are no where as physically comfortable as Control-C and Control-V on the PC.  Everything else is pretty much a learning curve, but after a quarter century of working with Microsoft-powered computers, I think that is to be expected.

Well, I just had my first encounter with Apple customer support, and I have to say I’m impressed.

After my hard drive failure a few weeks back, I had to put my iPod Touch apps back on the system, which I had luckily backed up.  Well, last night I had some issues with the Touch, so I did a reset, and went to sync the apps back onto it and… no luck.

I tried everything under the sun, and today I finally gave up and called them.  The first rep walked me through all the basics, staying with me on the phone the entire time.  After about 30-minutes he knew it was beyond him, and passed me up to a senior tech, Rick.  Rick spent about 15-minutes working on it before he determined he was also stumped.

This is where I got impressed.  Instead of just giving up, he said he was going to pass this up to an engineer, and that they would be calling sometime over the weekend, and if they didn’t, I was to call him directly.

What the…

All the way to an engineer?  A call back… on a weekend?

I had always heard how good their customer support is, and considering I bought this Touch used from someone else, I am even more impressed.  It may be that it can’t even be fixed due to the hard drive crash, and Rick was very blunt about that, but you can’t fault them for their effort and concern in this manner.  Major kudos to them.