Fortunately, I backed stuff up before the install, and won't be much hurt except for the aggravation. Nonetheless, it's annoying. At this point I'd say it's unlikely that I'll turn FV back on when I get the laptop running again. Let's just say I like the idea better than I like the implementation.

This is a powerful machine. For much of yesterday afternoon and evening I was:

• making massive file transfers across my WiFi network.
• copying and playing Christmas CDs, and
• checking for useful advice, using Safari.

My desktop system, which isn't a slouch, would have been (actually, was) stressed with all that activity. The Mac just puttered along. Pretty impressive.

Today's efforts were largely devoted to moving my e-mail focus from Eudora on the PC to whatever I could get working on the laptop. That turned out to be Apple's Mail, though I'm not committed to that decision. The transition was not a pretty effort; while it seems like this ought to be easy, it turns out to be exasperating. You can't just tell the new program to import the old program's files, so I tried a number of variations on "copy the files to the laptop and see if the client can import that." Nothing worked well. Eudora's instructions cover the basics but the results were pretty flakey. I'm also not convinced that Eudora's Mac interface meets my needs, though I'll likely give it another chance.

I can wholeheartedly endorse a format conversion tool called Emailchemy, by the way. A very fine piece of shareware.

Sometime soon I'll need to solve PopFile on OS X. That promises to be interesting.