Slowly but surely I’ve started to migrate the computers in the office from PCs to Macs. I’ll admit it, I’ve fallen in love with the aesthetic, OS and functionality just like the millions of other Mac nerds across this glorious planet. During my transition I’ve encountered just about every problem you can think of, from getting Macs and PCs to talk, to getting my Macs to print to shared Windows printers.

Well, finally, I can say that I’ve gotten managing a multicultural network down to a science. Today I’ll focus on network pollution. If you’ve ever used a PC and Mac together and shared files between the two, I’m sure you’ve seen .DS_Store and ._ files show up on your PC. While on the Mac you’ve seen Thumbs.db files pop up every once in a while. So, what are these files? Well, I’ll get to explaining them a little later on in this post. What I will tell you now, though, is that I’ve been able to rid my network of this file pollution with a couple of great programs, the modification of some settings on both the Macs and PCs and a lot of experimenting along the way to finally get rid of these pesky files.

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