[ Mac] New Users

[Magnakai]

I haven't found any use for partions on my main HD, personally. I did have one on an external drive to do a bootable SuperDuper backup, but I don't really use that, preferring to let Time Machine do it's thing.

I literally just upgraded to Snow Leopard after it finally arrived this morning, and I'm really impressed. It's got looaaaoaoaoaoads of minor tweaks. Well, loads of major ones, but minor for the end-user. I just (skim) read John Siracusa's obsessively detailed review and have noticed just how useful all of these little things are.

There's some great other stuff too - things I've noticed or seen posted elsewhere are quite cool include:

• Hit Expose, and you can sort item Alphabetically by hitting Command+1
• You can also sort them by application by hitting Command+2
• Staying in Expose, you can hit Tab to switch through the open applications one by one
• You can also Quicklook items in Expose
• A biggie for me here, and worth the upgrade price alone: Alt+Click on the volume icon in the taskbar to bring up a quick little audio In/Out chooser. Amazing! (for me)
• Enlarge the icons with the little slider and, past a certain point, you can "use" them - play movies, navigate through a PDF etc.
• Impressively, these can be QuickLooked with a tap of the spacebar into their current state - a movie keeps playing from the same point without a hitch. Very neat!
• Inbuilt system-wide text-replacement! It's under the Languages & Text thing in System Preferences.
• More column options in the Save/Load dialog. Minor but nice.

It's a really nice, smooth upgrade and so far everything bar my favourite screen saver is working. Apparently he's working on an upgrade, so no big loss there

Good work, Apple!

[randombs]

Ooh that volume icon one is cool. Although I've been wondering - is there a breakout box or something you could buy to plug in and give you separate ports (13" uMBP)? While I don't need simultaneous input and output right now, I may use it later on...

Oh, and I remembered my second question - does anyone use OSX's (SL or otherwise) built-in firewall? If so, is it ok? If not, do you use a different program or not use any firewall at all? With XP and Vista I just use the built-in firewalls and they're fine and easy to use with minimal configuring.

[Richie_uk]

Upgrade is fine mate. This isn't Windows...

nice one cheers mate, just upgraded today....lovely stuff.

RIP Windows ;-)

[Fei Fong Wong]

Oh, and I remembered my second question - does anyone use OSX's (SL or otherwise) built-in firewall? If so, is it ok? If not, do you use a different program or not use any firewall at all? With XP and Vista I just use the built-in firewalls and they're fine and easy to use with minimal configuring.

Are you behind a NAT router? If so that should act as a hardware firewall and then you needn't bother with a software firewall. If not, then yes the Mac OS X firewall is fine. You can enable stealth mode by clicking the 'Advanced' button to block ICMP, I don't think it's enabled by default.

[randombs]

Yeah I'm behind a NAT router and I did turn on stealth mode in the settings, although I'd have thought that the router itself blocking ICMP would be enough surely (I've never turned off stealth on the XP firewall either, I only thought about this right now)?

I just assumed Snow Leopard may block outgoing connections which my router doesn't do

[Strolls]

The guys who are upgrading hard-drives for performance - how much space do you need in a laptop? I'd have thought you'd go for an SSD (performance + battery life), and maybe an external drive or mini-NAS if you use the laptop at home a lot.

billy_dimashq: what Mac do you have that you're applying this firmware update to, please?

Partitioning: just don't. (except part of a bootcamp install). Same with antivirus.

I'm more excited about Snow Leopard than I was about 10.5. The excitement reminds me of when 10.4 was in beta, and I used Exposé for the first time. That was just amazing! I'm really looking forward to the Services menu being fixed, as I've always found the "convert case" feature really annoying to get to. I'll be a bit disappointed if Spotlight is still rubbish, though.

[randombs]

SSD's way too expensive for me to justify it right now. There's a Vaio I've seen that uses a 64gb SSD for Vista and also a 500gb regular hdd for data. That would be my ideal setup as I could save money on the SSD itself while still having a decent amount of space for stuff. Also, from what I've gathered, it seems these OSes aren't really optimised for SSDs yet and treat them like normal hard drives in the way they store data on them.

I've got a 13" Macbook Pro which I bought three weeks ago. It came with a 160gb 5400rpm hard drive. I was going to replace it with a 250gb 7200rpm one (they're only about £45) but after reading reviews I decided against it for now and am sticking with the WD Scorpio 250gb drive which got good reviews. If you have the same (or the 15" model too), DO NOT put EFI 1.7 on there!

I haven't bothered partitioning, I just made some nice folders instead. One of the folders is called Old Stuff which has everything from my previous laptop and weighs in at 145gb, so I would have started to reach the limits of the 160gb drive quickly. Of course, a bit of that will be removed as it contains a lot of Windows programs, but I imagine only 2-3gb worth.

Most of the stuff is music and pictures, and I'm getting into musical stuff like mixing and playing piano and these eat up lots of space (Ableton's piano samples are nearly 2gb alone). Videos are on my media PC with the bigger hard drives. As for external drives, I don't get on well with them and keep finding myself in situations outside the house where I forgot to bring a drive with me so prefer everything in one place. I just use mine for occasional backing up and transferring big things between machines.

I tend not to overspend on storage and ram, but in this case the price is low enough to get a speed and storage boost at the same time.

[randombs]

I NEED A FOOFBAG!

Does anyone know a good site to order from? I may go direct but it'll take ages. I'm specifically after the Tsunami 13.3" sleeve:



Cheers

[JamesS]

Does anybody use Parallels with their Boot Camp partition? I've read in a few places which say that you need to keep reauthorizing Windows every time you swap between running under Parallels and booting directly. But other people seem to say it's fine. I'd be using it with Vista Home Premium, if that makes a difference.

[ChrisF]

I am. No issues here with Windows 7. Never had to re-authorise. It did say in Parallels that you would have to, but I've not been prompted.

[randombs]

Would it depend at all on the Windows license you're using? My XP Pro licence is retail and I've never had any issues with activation and the like, whereas with OEM copies I'd have to ring MS after activating a few times over the internet (it's free and all automated, but still).

I've been looking into Parallels. At the moment I'm using Virtualbox and it's great, but the ability to use the same Windows install in native and virtualised modes has me interested...

[JamesS]

Apparently the Vista Home license doesn't let you run it in a virtual machine, so that might be a problem. Maybe Pro works but home doesn't or something.

[randombs]

I'd imagine the license doesn't go beyond the text itself, as I doubt XP Home would know it's being run in a VM considering how old it is. I could be wrong, and they could do an update, but I imagine it's more likely a case of them hoping to catch you in the act rather than their software actively checking.

[Brad]

I've been looking into Parallels. At the moment I'm using Virtualbox and it's great, but the ability to use the same Windows install in native and virtualised modes has me interested...

I do this. It's awesome. Works extremely well. However, Parallels will let you do some amazing stuff such as combining your documents folders on your Mac and the Windows VM, as well as picture, music etc. and even let you launch Windows files using mac applications. Sounds amazing in theory but in practice it gets pretty confusing. I suggest turning these features off. Anyway, in summary Parallels is excellent. Virtualbox is great, and free! but Parallels is better.

[muddy]

I started off with Parallels, but switched to VMWare Fusion. Basically both do the same thing. Bloody ace to be able to run my usual mac dev set up, a Windows environment for testing, BackTrack for... erm, penetration testing?