Switching to Mac and have tons of MP3s, Word docs, and other vital files that you really need on your Mac? Of course, you can buy Move2Mac, or any other file transfer software/special cables, but of no one wants to pay anything when it can be done for free. There's also the "Connect to Server" feature on Macs in which you can mount your PC's hard drive on your Mac's desktop, when both computers are on the same LAN and drag files onto your Mac. However, this feature is still very unstable for me a large majority of the time. It was consistently freezing up both machines in the process of transferring files. About 15 tries later, a hard reset did more than make me ill, it left my 17" PowerBook completely unbootable. I was left with no option but to completely reformat and reinstall OS X, rendering all my previous set up work on the machine.
So after reinstalling, spending countless hours awake re-setting up everything and getting over my anger, I was still back to the drawing board relative to transferring files from the PC to the Mac. So after racking my brain, I thought of something to try, and lo and behold, it worked 98% seamlessly, was absolutely free, and never once caused my Mac any trouble!
So what is this magical solution? You'd probably never think of it, actually: Yahoo Messenger. The latest versions of Yahoo Messenger for PC and Mac have something amazing built-in: when two users are logged on and sending messages and files (the files is the key here) over the same LAN, it automatically defaults to sending those messages/files via the LAN rather than the internet. This allows for speeds up to 100Mbps for file transfers between the machines connected via Yahoo Messenger on the same LAN!
Log onto Messenger on your PC using one username, and on your Mac using another usernamename, message each other, request to send a file, make the Mac accept it, and your file begins transferring from the PC to the Mac at LAN speeds without any crashing problems. The only reason I said "98%" seamless above is that ONE single time out of 30 transfers, my PC only locked up and required a reboot, while the Mac just cancelled the transfer and awaited another one - beautiful!
However, the only limitation I've seen is that the files need to be under 900MB in size, as 900MB+ files will download but won't finalize and save onto the Mac's drive (I let it sit six hours hoping it would eventually save, but it wouldn't). I created about 25 or so .zip files using StuffIt for Windows with roughly 900MB of data in each of them, and a couple hours later, I had all 19gigs of my data on my Mac without crashing the Mac a single time!
Hope this helps other switchers out, enjoy!
[robg adds: I've never had any trouble with Connect to Server talking to either my Windows or Linux boxes, but if you are having issues, Messenger seems to offer a unique solution to the problem. I'm sure there are other creative ways of working around it as well ...]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2003041011473097