When Windows people give me shit about using a Mac I just take it cause there’s no point in arguing, but inside I am giggling. Giggling like a little girl.
Here’s why: I just used a free program called Carbon Copy Cloner to back my main laptop up to an external USB hard drive. It backs up everything, quickly, and makes the drive bootable. Then I unplugged it, plugged it into my 5 year old other Mac laptop and held down Option when it started. I chose the external USB hard drive as my boot drive and I am now instantly up and running with my exact operating system, all my data, preferences, everything. The only thing I had to change was the background image of my laptop monitor since I hadn’t previously assigned one to that monitor. My two laptops are pretty different: Different CPUs, RAM, drives, video, chipsets – just totally different. When I booted Mac OS X didn’t even utter a peep. No driver dialogs, no incompatible drivers, nothing. Just starts up and runs.
If you tried doing this with a Windows machine it would be a world of hurt and it probably just plain wouldn’t ever work unless the machines were nearly identical. You would spend hours clicking through drive installations and driver conflicts. Eventually you would just give up and reinstall Windows. And then all your preferences would be gone because you don’t know the black magic required to get your registry copied over. Oh, and don’t forget to “Activate” it.
You might think it’s Carbon Copy Cloner doing all the work and nothing to do with Mac. That’s about 10% right. CCC does a great job making sure all files are copied over and that the drive is bootable but the real magic is that Mac OS X has an intelligent driver system that Just Works.
Macs are way better.