Since we made the mistake of upgrading the iPads and iPhones in the office to iOS 8.0,2 a bit early, we were sort of tuck jumping on Yosemite. After letting the first batch of guinea pigs convert last week, we watched the blogs, and didn’t see anything too bad.
Our office runs dual screen computers. Mac Mini’s with Parallels to be exact. Windows on the right screen, OSX on the left. This has been a nice balance even if it does push the speed of the Mac Mini back quite a bit.
We don’t use apple screens, simply due to price. Samsung has worked quite well, and all of our screens are Samsung Displays and HDTV’s with VGA inputs of various sizes and year models.
As soon as the upgrade was complete we found a problem. The larger screens on most desks are dual use HDTV’s with either VGA, DVI or HDMI inputs. The second screen of equal or smaller size is a higher resolution monitor.
Just like when we got the original OSX setup, the Mac configured the monitors to the optimum setting for the screens. Normally this would be ok, but we had “scaled” the screens so that when you dragged a document from the left o the right, it appeared in the same position and the same size. Otherwise the document would appear to shrink about 20% as it went onto the higher resolution display.
So after some tweaking, we got the monitors to the resolutions that we were used too seeing. The cartoon style over simplified icons in the tray were the first thing we noticed and didn’t really like, but decided this was less processing power so it was for the better.
Then we noticed the higher resolution displays that were scaled down so the sizes would appear equal were blurry. The scaling wasn’t working as it had before. Leaving all of the displays in native mode and letting the Mac decided or negotiate the resolution works great but then the right screen looks tiny.
Scaling the left screen smaller made it worse, so we ended up with slightly blurry right screens for right now. Hopefully a patch will appear soon to fix this.
We also had to spend $49 per computer to upgrade to Parallels for Yosemite. We knew this was going to happen, and clearly so did everyone else. The website wouldn’t let us pay, it just gave us a notice that it was being handled manually.
Come back in a couple of days and we’ll let you know how it goes. We still think a dual screen Mac running Parallels and Windows is the best set up for any business with over 5 employees simply because there isn’t any decent accounting software for business that is native to OSX. The good version of Quickbooks only runs on Windows.
Update #1 – 12 hours after upgrading – We found that several documents which were password protected suddenly needed no password after the update. This was quite odd, and we are not sure if it is related to the new disk encryption that we enabled. After disk encryption finished the speed appeared quite normal which is a pleasant surprise. I just hope we don’t encrypt our server and lose the keys.
We have a NetGear Ready NAS NV+ with 8TB of storage. Since the update, connections have worked better. We’ll keep you posted.
