• Disk image creation
• Disk image mounting and management
• Hard disk cloning
• PDF reading
• PDF creation
• PDF editing (watermarking, rotation, etc)
• The capacity to install the operating system on a USB-connected external hard drive

I actually lied a little on that last one. You see, that last one simply isn’t possible at all! The situation was this: I had a small form-factor PC that needed a 2.5″ IDE hard drive. So I figured, with my Mac-accustomed brain, “I’ll stick its blank hard drive into an external enclosure, plug that into a PC, then run Windows setup from there, setting the external hard drive as the target of the install.”

No dice. Now first of all, the procedure that I just illustrated works in the Mac world. It works. I can install OS X on any sort of connected hard drive; via USB, via Firewire, from one Mac directly to another’s hard drive over Firewire, over the network via netboot—any way I like with whatever infrastructure I have available. So it was somewhat frustrating when Windows stubbornly refused to install. It would see the drive; I could even partition and format the drive, but install Windows? Nope, nada. Sadly, I’m pretty used to this sort of cantankerous hocus-pocus, so I started thinking about how I could actually get around the problem to accomplish the goal.

I had a mad combination of external enclosures that supported different drive standards and some of which didn’t work on some computers, and I also had several types of drives; 2 SATA and 1 IDE. Here’s what I wound up doing: connecting one of the 2.5″ SATA drives to some PC’s internal SATA connector, thus temporarily making it an internal drive. I then installed Windows on it. When I was done, I removed the drive, reconnected the PC’s original 3.5″ internal drive, and booted it up. Then I put the 2.5″ SATA drive into an external enclosure and attached that to the PC, and then did the same with a 2.5″ IDE drive. Now, as luck would refuse to have it, the IDE drive was being used for backup, so couldn’t just clone the SATA drive onto the IDE one unless I didn’t care much about that backup. So I copied its backup onto the SATA drive, giving me a SATA drive with a Windows install on it sitting alongside a copy of the backup, and an IDE drive with the original backup. The next step was to clone the SATA drive with everything on it onto the IDE drive, whereupon I deleted the backup from the IDE drive (didn’t need it there) and deleted Windows from the SATA drive (don’t need Windows on a backup disk). Finally (finally!), I put the IDE drive into the computer and…

DISK BOOT FAILURE

…and so on and so on and so on. The nightmare continued throughout the whole day, and in the end, I still didn’t manage to get the PC up and running. In the end, I ended up attaching an internal optical drive to the motherboard’s ATA connector ((Also, for some reason, this motherboard ATA connector actually used pin 20, so I had to poke a hole in my ATA cable to get the damn thing to fit, go figure.)) and an AC to molex adapter, and then I installed Windows from there finally I went through the refreshingly usual nonsense of hunting down drivers, and even then it took about 3 hours to get the LAN drivers working for some still unknown reason. Thank goodness it was only two days of lost time.

By contrast, here’s what the process would look like if this situation had involved Macs:

1. Boot the Mac into Firewire Target Mode and connect it to another Mac.
2. Pop an install DVD into the connected Mac and use it to install Mac OS X on the Firewire Target Mode computer.

It takes about an hour. I’m serious; deadly serious. I’ve done this process literally dozens of times, and it’s alarming how much more time-efficient is is than swapping drives, cracking open cases, modifying ATA cables to fit, or fiddling and diddling with Windows. Even the installation of Mac OS X takes about half the time that installing Windows does; the copy of Windows I installed just this morning took an hour and 22 minutes, and that’s before I installed the drivers. By contrast, The version of OS X I installed about a week ago that needed no such post-install mumbo-jumbo completed in more like 40 minutes.

This is not my first IT job. Based on my experiences here at CLIQK Digital as well as those as my previous job, I can confidently say that Macs running Mac OS X are significantly more robust than either Windows PCs, or even those very same Macs when they’re running Windows. The Macs in my last workplace were a dream to support compared to the Dell PCs we had which routinely fell over and died as a matter of course. I can’t even begin to express how many times I spent a whole morning attacking a Windows problem so unique in its randomness that it surprised the entire department.

As an IT person, my primary goal is to make the machines I supports as robust and fault-tolerant as possible, for the simple and selfish reason that it makes my job easier. When PCs get overrun with malware or confused by floppy disks, it wastes my time fixing problems that don’t ever happen in Mac-land and prevents me from accomplishing other tasks, which often consist of far more meaningful things like updating important websites, creating policies for new computer use trends, training staff in new software, or transitioning to more efficient back-end systems. Having to install Acrobat Reader for the zillionth time or re-re-explain that opening random email attachments will result in lost time for everyone just adds to my already-full plate of technical tasks.

The intertubes are filled with stories of organizations that overcame their institutional inertia and saved trucktons of cash by switching to Macs or Linux. I believe it. Microsoft’s IT-centric technologies like Exchange and Active Directory are hellishly complex and notoriously unreliable without full-time support staffs (staves?) and backup servers up the wazoo. This is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dollars routinely shelled out for outrageous per-user licensing fees for these products. And it’s not just lost money, it’s lost time; in my current workplace, we don’t even have the “luxury” of all of our computers being from one brand, so all of them need different drivers to run and different keystrokes to enter the BIOS, which, as you may be able to imagine, wastes. a. lot. of. time. Bottom line: Windows is expensive and unreliable; the very bane of IT. The sooner it’s replaced by something—anything—easier to maintain, the better.