Well, I finally did it. My personal Mac laptop succumbed to a Pepsi Syndrome incident, and I'm replacing it with a Windows laptop. I can talk about why, if anybody is interested, but then again, nobody reads this wiki except me, and I already know why, so never mind.

AAAAAAAAANY way... this post is mostly me "thinking out loud".

Hardware

Q420VA-EVO.I7512, SN:RAN0LP01P335427 ASUS Zenbook 14X laptop.

• Changed to light mode (I hate dark mode)

• Swapped Caps Lock and left Ctrl keys. Regedit: (new binary value, modify binary value)

[Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]: "Scancode Map"
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 1D 00 3A 00 3A 00 1D 00 00 00 00 00

• Start "MyAsus" app.

• Disable numberpad: Device Settings:

  • Battery Care Mode: on
  • Noise Cancelling Speaker: off
  • Number Pad: lock

• Windows -> search "device manager" -> "human interface devices", right-click "HID-compliant touch screen", disable

• Add printer or scanner.

Basic Software

One thing about MacOS is it comes pre-loaded with a fair amount of general productivity software that Windows does not.

• Email
  • uninstall existing office tools.
  • install Office 2021 for Outlook (just for Lloyd).
  • Install mailbird for me. (Doesn't find Lloyd).
• Calendar - part of outlook
• Address Book - part of outlook
• Preview (which has surprisingly good PDF manipulation functionality)
  • PDF24 Creator
• Music
  • iTunes (app store). . download all music
  • iCloud for Windows (app store).
• Books
  • Kindle
  • PDF24
• iPhone integration (photos, music, notes, contacts). Looks like https://support.apple.com/en-us/118290
• Unix
  • WSL Setup
• GitHub usage via git
• Zoom
• Swap caps lock and ctrl
• Display hidden files, file extensions
  • File explorer, "...", "view" tab, "display full path in title bar", check "show hidden files, folders, drives", uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types", uncheck "Hide protected operating system files"
• TightVNC viewer
• ReMarkable
• VueScan for scanner

Contacts

Ugh. I don't like this, but I guess I trusted one evil corporation with my private data, so why not another? Besides, I have some evidence that my contacts leaked out a number of years ago. I exported my apple contacts, which did not include notes (and probably other things like birthdays). I imported that into Google. So now Google has my whole contact list.

Mailbird downloaded Google contacts.

But I don't have active sync between icloud and PC.

Brew

Brew is another thing that Mac has that Windows does not, but Brew is mostly to give MacOS more Linux-like tools, and Windows WSL2 is much better for that than Brew. But there may be some exceptions...

Other Third Party Packages

• Lastpass
• Grammarly
• Github Desktop (?)
• Basic

Transferring Stuff

• Bookmarks (turned on Chrome sync).