Back To Mac

For the last couple of months I have been using my Mac as a PC - sacrilege I know.  I had repartitioned my hard drive using Boot Camp with the larger share going to the PC and I also set the system to automatically boot into the PC side.

This was so I could get used to using Windows 7 which, in my opinion, is the best version of Windows Microsoft have ever produced.  It is still more resource hungry than Snow Leopard though and now it's time to go back (OSX being better than any Microsoft product).

So, my experiment is now over and I have repartitioned my system to give the lions share of my hard drive back to the Mac and I am now back to using Snow Leopard full time.

It took a bit of technical jiggery-pokery to do the repartitioning and involved me using the Mac application Winclone to shrink the NTFS Boot Camp partition and then copying it as a disk image to an external hard disk.  I was then able to run Boot camp once to remove the NTFS partition and then again to create a new smaller partition.  I then had to run Winclone for a second time to copy the imaged NTFS partition back into the new space and then expand it to fill the new Boot Camp partition.

The only thing that has been a pain has been re-syncing my iPhone with iTunes as you are only allowed to sync with one user account.  I have kept my media files on the Boot Camp drive so I had to import them into a new library in iTunes for the Mac.  Unfortunately, part of re-pairing my iPhone to what it thinks is a new computer involves it automatically deleting the music from the phone and then re copying the "new" library to it.  This will take a while as I use the option to convert music files from the original 256kbs MP3 files to 128kbs AAC ones.  However, once this is done it will be OK.

I know all this sounds a bit of a faff but, if I'm honest, I enjoy doing things like this.  I actually miss being a technical engineer and this sort of thing helps keep my hand in.  I still think that Apple could make it a bit easier though.