Can I Use the Mac for Work?

One of the first tests I wanted to do was to see if I could use the iMac for work things. I do tech support for my company so I wanted to see how much I would be able to do just using the iMac. Remember that this is an older iMac running Panther (OS X 10.3.x), The first thing I needed to do was to get connected and to do that I needed to create a VPN connection. This was actually very easy and I was connected quickly. In fact, I was able to connect to a VPN connection that was giving me trouble when I attempted to do that via my PC. Once connected I tried to map a network drive...that worked. Then I tried some remote control items using our IP-based KVM and that worked as well. Although FireFox and Safari allowed me to do some web-based things, we have at least one or two applications that unfortunately only work well or at all in IE...fortunately the version of OS X that came installed on my iMac was old enough to still have a copy of IE so that problem was solved as well. Unfortunately, current shipping versions of OS X no longer have IE as an available app since MS has stopped production of IE for the Mac. We occasionally use VNC, but that was a little problematic until I discover Chicken of the VNC. This is a great VNC application...much better than just about anything available for the PC. Built-in VNC is also available on newer versions of OS X.

The bottom line to all of this is that I can do about 95% of all troubleshooting of my network and desktops using my old iMac. I didn't have to jump through any hoops to make it happen and it worked really well.