Over a year ago we did something radical at our small family-run A/V studio here in Nepal: we decided to ditch all of our PCs and buy all new Macs. And I mean all of them, down to the last laptop. But no one here was an apple fanboy or girl (in fact most of the staff had never even seen one), and this represented a significant investment in a risky business (compared to a Momo shop say) and in a business with low margins in the first place. This is just a short report on the transition and the results.
We had been running Protools LE systems on PCs for almost 2 years and seemed constantly plagued with problems, from faulty firewire cards to contaminated software and files to complete system failures due to bad house wiring and an electrical grid that can re-animate dead flesh on a stormy nite.
When our Studio appeared in a local trade rag headlined as "Studio Shuts Down Due to Virus; Expect Delays" I had had enough. I went to the White Tower kneeling, and immediately placed my order with the only Apple dealer in town (Kathmandu has a population of over 1.75 million). I figured that the transition to new boxes and new software would take months, if not a year, and that we would still suffer
new machine blues and
learning curves thru the roof, as well delays from the Apple dealer if anything hardware-wise went wrong.
I was wrong. The transition took less then 30 days and we were back into production full swing. The boys in the Studio learned Leopard in a week (some did not even notice the change) and since we had Parallels Desktop installed on machines, any desire or need to go back to Windows XP was not a problem. As the IT lead, I installed TimeMachine and created a snapshot in Parallels right out of the chute.
I immediately noticed two things: we were no longer loosing files or entire machine set-ups due to IT incompetence (I'm sorry, I gotta say that musicians are not the most organized of folks) - or to viral infections, the most common problem. Before the transition, we were re-installing XP on boxes on average of once per month due to infection. And I can hear the security nerds out there screaming: Just protect yourself!…Just use Windows Update!…bla bla bla bla bla. Well, in Nepal, there is no secure way to protect your self and still run a business. It's a rat's nest, and you will get infected no matter what you do. In fact, for PC users here, it's just a way of life. Most folks have given up; even IT experts in large Nepali corps, working in hermetically sealed environments, have thrown up their hands in despair.
But having Macs installed instantly turned the rat's nest into a pristine palace. There has not been a single loss of a file since. In fact, our average down time went from days per month (for all problems) to hours or even to 1 hour per month. Here is the "how and why" of our dramatic reduction:
- Fast resolution of virus infections on the PC side using snapshots in Parallels desktop - and no infected files by keeping all data on HPFS drives and backed up in TimeMachine.
- Reduced downtime for internal hardrive or any software-related problems by Installing OSX & critical apps on all external drives; if the internal went down, users just booted up off the closest external and went back to work until the internal was fixed.
- Reduced downtime for complete system failures: for example, one new iMac went dead after just a few weeks of use. We pulled an MBP out of a box and used the TimeMachine backup from the iMac and installed that on the MBP. Within a few hours, we were back online like nothing happened. When the replacement came back from Apple a few weeks later, we reversed the process, and here again, it took just an hour or two to get back to production work.
In addition to downtime savings, the learning curve was much less then anticipated. Protools users on the PC side had no problem adjusting to Protools on the Mac side, even considering the incompatibility of some plugins. But in these cases, users just fired up Parallels with PC Protools installed and worked there with the required PC-only plugin.
One irritating note: There is a glitch in Parallels and VMWare – neither has firewire support! That means that if your using PC Protools LE or even something like PC Premiere with a firewire-attached camera, you have to go to BootCamp instead of working in a virtual environment, which I will no longer do!
Well, that's the current news from Lake WindowsBeGone, where: all the women are in sari, all the men have clean feet, and all the children are above average.
Best Wishes,
Jigs
