About to jump over to a PC...Scary
wscottart
Posts: 442
After using Macs for pretty much exclusively for for over 20 years, I'm making the jump to an AMD Ryzen 7-Series - 32GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 - 3TB Hard Drive + 480GB Solid State. Any advice for making this move? Do the installers downloaded in the DIMM (mac) work on windows 10. I'm so excited but yet terrified!
BTW: Will Bryce run in windows 10?
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I am going to assume that you are having this new machine prebuilt for you with the operating system already installed? If so, hopefully the builder will have tested it to make certain that the hardware and software are all in order and working correctly. You may wish to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with things prior to diving in and installing a bunch of applications and transferring data so that you are a little more comfortable doing so.
I would be inclined to re-download your DAZ content when you make the switch. That won't help you with any content obtained elsewhere, but apart from some files that won't be of any use to you in Windows, such as the MAC .store files, I think everything should work. You 'll need to copy any content that you won't be re-downloading into the correct location in your new content library, as the MAC paths are slightly different, I believe. If you want thumbnails, though, all those MAC thumbnails will need to be replaced with Windows thumbs. You'll need to get your head around the different conventions used for drives and folders under Windows vs MAC OS, but DIMM may offer a little help until you get the hang of things. There is no reason to be terrified. It'll just be a little different and, as long as you expect that, you'll be fine. If you run into any problems, you can always come here for assistance. If its any consolation, Windows 10 isn't exactly like previous versions of Windows, at least GUI-wise, so you won't be entirely alone in your adventure. Insofar as Bryce is concerned, I seem to recall someone else mentioning that they were running it under Windows 10 (Chohole, perhaps?), but I can't tell you myself, since I don't use Windows 10.
On another, largely irrelevant note, despite the conditioning associated with those "I'm a MAC, I'm a PC" commercials, you should know that if your MAC was not one of the old Power PC boxes, you have already been using a PC. That has been the case since Apple switched over to Intel. The term "PC" is short for IBM Personal Computer, which was the first developed by IBM based upon the Intel i86 architecture. Every personal computer running on an Intel or AMD processor since has been based upon that architecture, and is therefore, by definition, a PC. including recent MACs. The term refers to the hardware, not the software. If you are using an Intel or AMD processor, it doesn't matter whether you are using Windows, or MAC OS or Linux, they are all PCs. Apologies for the rant.
I use both platforms side by side (one Logitech mouse and keyboard that seamlessly work on both computers). Mac is what I started on and I still love it, but there are things I can only get for Windows. It's a lot easier now to get used to a Windows machine. I found Windows 10 Home is now installed on almost all Windows machines sold. There are some disadvantages to this. It may have just been my personal experience, but I was unable to create a new profile. Fortunately, I inherited this Windows laptop from my brother who had created another profile before the changes (correct me if I'm wrong those with more Windows knowledge).
At the behest of a good friend who does IT and is good at it, I disabled Edge and Cortana and found my system ran much better without it. He also installed something called OpenShell (I'm not going to attempt to explain), he just assured me that I would be happier with it than the way Windows 10 is set up). Others will have to verify this other thing he explained to me, but an upcoming Windows 10 update is going to require several gigabytes dedicated to it, so we have turned off updates for now till we learn more.
Since I go back and forth between my Mac and PC, I stored all my Daz stuff on an external HD. It's a mirror of what's on my Mac. I am so glad I did that, I use that as my primary on the Windows (I also have an external on my Mac) and DIM writes directly to these. Frees up a lot of space on my machine. Something to look into and think about.
Good luck with your new system.
Like Cris, I operate a mixed Mac/Windows environment (most of my modelling is done on the Mac, most of the rendering on the PC). I even have a similar single shared bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo (drag the mouse pointer from one to the other & it switches the keyboard too!)
If you have networked storage, you can point DIM to a shared common downloads folder (just be careful not to have DIM running on both machines at once). DS will let you share content libraries too, although that isn't the case for Carrara because of the way it stores data inside the app (Mac). Don't know about Bryce cos I haven't really used it. You may be better off letting DIM install everything to the new machine rather than copying things across (but you can definitely copy the downloads folder if you're bandwidth-limited). The only real issue you'll find is with plug-ins that are compiled specifically for Windows or Mac. Regular content is just fine.
In my experience, Bryce runs just fine in Windows 10. I am still a Mac user, but I run Windows 10 under Parallel on my Mac, and Bryce works just the way it should.
While my loyalty still lies with the MacOS, Windows 10 seems to be a very modern and perfectly functional operating system (hell, even Windows 7 isn't bad). One thing that impresses me about it is the way that it maintains compatibility with older software. I can not only run Bryce 7.1 on Windows 10, I can even run Mojoworld 3. Advances in hardware mean that Mojoworld 3 running under Windows 10 under Parallels on my 2014 MacBook Pro performs far better -- much faster, more responsive and stable -- than when I was running it on MacOS many years ago.
The content that you downloaded using DIM is actually in the form of ZIP files, rather than installers. ZIP files are cross-platform, so you should be able to simply copy them across to your shiny new PC, put them in DIM's preferred directory, then fire up DIM to install them. There may be a handful of exceptions to this: you may have noticed that when using DIM to install some software or scripts that it popped up a permissions dialog that mentioned something called 'osascript'. That's a Mac-specific thing, and probably indicates the presence of a Mac-specific installer; you'll need to redownload the equivalent Windows package to get it to install properly. But otherwise -- particularly for any models intended for use in DAZ Studio -- I'd expect your existing ZIP files to work just fine on Windows. And if I'm wrong about that, you can always re-download.
Yes, but do yourself a favour and install Bryce manually, don't allow DIM to install it, as it doesn't seem to realise how fussy Bryce is as to where things are installed Horo has a very useful PDF about Bryce install on his site https://horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/BryceContent_v4.pdf
I thank everyone of you for your responses. You are truly incredible individuals. You each have contributed plenty for me to think about. For one thing I have all my zips, but can I use the manifest for the dim from on my external drive with this new machine? I've been successful at sharing the manifest between a couple of macs. Even though I really never use the second one, its just sort of a back up, but they both are able to successfully pull and write from the external when connected.
New machine arrived today, and yabba dabba doo I've got Bryce running for the first time in years.
One think I had not taken into account for my daz libraries and many of the installers I have on externals. They are all formatted for MACOS. Any way to trick Windows into reading the drives?
What you need is a utility that will read HFS formatted drives. Note when you connect the drive to the PC Windows will say the drive needs to be formatted to use. Don't do that. It will erase the data you want. Just cancel and run HFSexplorer or whatever you got to read the files. Once you get the files off you will want to format the drive to something Windows does understand and then copy the files back.
Thank you, I also found a fat enabled thumbdrive that lets me move some file back and forth. SO now I have Bryce and Painter up and running. Just a few more Million files to move.