[ Mac] New Users

[eASY aDDICT]

I am completely with Fishbowlhead on this one.

I am in no way a power user and am fairly competent with both PC and Mac.

I have an old 1.42 Mac mini with 1gb of ram etc and it still runs as well as it did 4 years ago when I bought it. I have never had an major crashes etc.

My father has a dell pc at home, in the office and one in a house in spain. They are all loaded down with anti virus this and anti something the other. He is always calling me with problems with them whether it be one thing or the other and for that reason I would not go back to a PC at home.

Like fishbowl said you can set up a mac and it just works.

I know there becomes a point when the Apple hype machine can take over but for surfing, photos, music, movies etc I think there is no better.

[Lyris]

I know there becomes a point when the Apple hype machine can take over but for surfing, photos, music, movies etc I think there is no better.

This I agree with, for many tasks, a platform where the OS and hardware are refined by the same people makes a lot of sense.

FullSpecWarrior - what's crap exactly about Vista? No offense intended (or taken), but I've been using it for years (OK, OK - for a long time), and I don't see what the big issue is. I hear Windows Mojave is great though

[Richard.John]

I downloaded this yesterday. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...earthdesk.html

Okay so you have to pay, but it is a thing of beauty and surprisingly informative. A hurricane is currently mashing the caribbean as we speak, but I knew that anyway as it was staring me in the face.

[Lyris]

Beautiful. That is exactly the sort of thing I love about the Mac platform, there's things that aren't necessarily useful, but are just fun to have around.

Oh, and I'm loving this program:

http://www.bean-osx.com/

It's a word processor that's nice to look at, free, and just works

[Richard.John]

Yes, Mac is pure love....

I have a question regarding Apple's Time Capsule thingy. I feel it's time to back up my system via time machine but is Apple's wireless hardware solution worth it or should I just buy any old wired HDD, and hide it under my desk.

EDIT:I think I may have answered my own question. A wired HDD will be faster and more reliable. Cheaper too.

[eASY aDDICT]

I'm using the WD My Book Studio Edition 500Gb for back up via Time Machine and it is faultless.

It will be interesting to see the difference in backup time once I open my Xmax Macbook and have to connect it via USB2

[JP]

Just changed the title as it seems more suitable and also due to the hopefully impending Mac/Apple sub-forum.

[Richard.John]

Yes!!!! Went out and got a 500gb I.O data firewire 800 unit. It must be said that Time Machine is ****ing genius.

[muddy]

Yes!!!! Went out and got a 500gb I.O data firewire 800 unit. It must be said that Time Machine is ****ing genius.

You only realise the TRUE genius of it when you overwrite a file/folder, corrupt a file or lose a project, and Time Machine lets you step back and pull it back. Amazing.

[Richard.John]

I look, gulp, forward to that day.

[Lyris]

You only realise the TRUE genius of it when you overwrite a file/folder, corrupt a file or lose a project, and Time Machine lets you step back and pull it back. Amazing.

Apparently, Vista has had a feature called "Shadow Copy" which does this too, which excited and surprised me when I heard about it. But guess what - it's not on the Home Premium edition that I have, you need the Business or Ultimate version!

I guess only Business people make mistakes and lose documents

[CMcK]

It's amazing that it took Apple and MS so long to actually implement such backup systems. People rely on their computers for so much personal media storage that not shelling out for another HDD seems almost foolish.

I've actually used Time Machine in an unintended fashion when I was editing some HD video footage. I needed space on my iMac for all the raw video but didn't have space. So I binned my iTunes library which freed up about 100GB of space. Once I had finished with iMovie I dumped the raw video files and restored my iTunes library. Piece of cake. And I do like the Time Machine interface. I think the visual nature of it makes it easier for Joe Bloggs to understand.

[Richard.John]

TM has a great user interface compared with system restore that I used to use on XP. So to clear up some confusion, TM makes multiple back ups, is that right? So even if you deleted your iTunes library and TM then made an hourly back up as usual, your original iTunes collection would just be somewhere prior and could be restored with a click. TM basically means you will, within limits, never lose another file again.I think that's right but just wanted to be 100%.

[CMcK]

Time Machine does an initial backup of your whole system and thereafter records any changes made. I believe it does an hourly backup which is consolidated once a week and then the weekly backups are consolidated once a month. Something like that anyway. Saves space that way.
I have a 250GB HDD in my iMac and a 500GB drive for Time Machine. Still hasn't filled the backup drive yet which is quite impressive considering my Mac is on 24/7.

[Richard.John]

Thanks for that. I have a 500 gb internal so logic would suggest that I should've got a bigger one for TM but 1TB seemed like overkill, and was overkill priced too, so I went with another 500 gb. A mere (potential) 1TB on tap now. Incredible really as I recall my Amiga having 512k RAM and no hdd back in the day.