I took the Mac plunge
- Thread starter RoJoHen
- Start date
Forgot to mention. You should probably invest in a drive for Time Machine to work. It's one of the single most important things you can do for your new computer.
If you have cash laying around, replace your wifi router with a Time Capsule. Then turn on Time Machine. You're done. Forget about it, it backs up over the air whenever you're online at home.
If you're not made of money, just get a USB hard drive and keep it plugged in whenever you can. Time Machine will use it when it can, and ignore it when it's unplugged. Obviously, this requires a little more effort on your part, but it's a lot cheaper.
Either way, just get Time Machine working.
If you have cash laying around, replace your wifi router with a Time Capsule. Then turn on Time Machine. You're done. Forget about it, it backs up over the air whenever you're online at home.
If you're not made of money, just get a USB hard drive and keep it plugged in whenever you can. Time Machine will use it when it can, and ignore it when it's unplugged. Obviously, this requires a little more effort on your part, but it's a lot cheaper.
Either way, just get Time Machine working.
It backs up your files. You pick an external drive and select it as your Time Machine drive. Then you ignore it. It just works in the background.
The cool thing is that it KEEPS backing up until the drive is full. So if you have Homework.doc from Tuesday it backs that up. Then let's say you write another page in it on Wednesday. It backs that up but it KEEPS the one from Tuesday too!
So you can always go back and find old versions of files. Forget hard drive failure, that's an extreme case. Have you ever changed a paper, saved it, and then have someone say they liked the old one better? Well, go back and get it!
So if you have a 300 GB backup drive and only 50 GB of files, you could possibly have at least 6 versions of every file on your computer. In addition, if you upgrade to another Mac in the future, you just plug your Time Machine drive into it and tell the Mac to upgrade itself from that. Your new Mac will be EXACTLY like your old Mac in a matter of hours. What's THAT worth?
It's cool stuff.
EDIT: Read More. Remember, now that you know this I don't want to see any "How do I get my songs off my iPod because my hard drive crashed" threads out of you. Got it?
I would need to purchase an iPod first.
I would need to purchase an iPod first.
Boy, you'd be really screwed, then!
I hope you enjoy your new toy
Now try playing starcraft with it -- no mouse, just the trackpad -- and you'll quickly get used to all the arcane button combinations
That's what bugs me about it, honestly. I don't like the idea that the drive will get full after a few weeks of use and no more backups, and I don't like the idea of buying a massively oversized drive just to get around that.
Give me backups for one week and overwrite anything older. That would be much more acceptable. If I want more than that I'll get Accurev.
I honestly can't see myself ever being in a situation where I would need to back up that much stuff. I don't do enough important work on my computer for it to ever be an issue.
Album art is a lost facet of music thanks to people and their i-Thingys.
Welcome back to the light side of The Force.
Amen to that. I had a shitty old Dell that was slowly dying over 6 months and finally screwed the pooch at Christmas time. (Hell of a time to need to buy something expensive)
I swore I would never get another Dell again a while ago. The quality has really declined over the past 10-12 years since I got my first one. My Dad still uses that old one for internet, email, and Word and it is slow but does the trick. The two I had since then were progressively worse, and my wife's hard drive crashed on her a few years back. Their tech support is beyond frustrating because they treat you like a moron and take half an hour to get to the point you were at when you called them.
Plus I've heard so many horror stories about Vista that it just didn't seem worth the while to get.
So I bought an iMac. I love it! It's compact, fast, the graphics are great. Once you unlearn PC and learn Mac, its quite easy and intuitive to work through.
Office '08 for Mac handles anything Office '07 for PC can do. So I can bring home documents and do work at home nights/weekends when I need to.
The dock feature on the desktop is really convenient. As are the expose and spaces features. The dashboard that shows you date/time, weather, and your calendar is a nice add on.
My wife has a MacBook for work and loves it. Her PC at home still works fine for now, though when it comes time to replace it we will get something like what I've got.
So, has anyone called you an elitist, soy latte sipping snob who enjoys the smell of their own farts yet? It goes with the territory.
Actually, most of my friends have either already made the switch to Mac or are planning to whenever their current computers die. The one friend I have that won't switch to switch is doing so because he uses PC-only programs for work, and it just wouldn't make sense for him to switch to Mac. I think he's kind of upset about it.
I am a .Net programmer at work and go home to a Mac. One of my dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft loving co-workers gave me a squinty-eyed look when I told him about my Mini. He was convinced I did myself a disservice by buying a machine that "no one supports" and "has no software". I almost laugh myself silly when he asked if the keyboard had function keys
You know, I'm not an expert (obviously, since I just got the damn thing), but that whole "no one supports/has no software" thing seems like a really out-dated attitude. I think one of the biggest selling features of the new Macs is just how compatible they are with a lot of Microsoft files. I got iWorks instead of Office for my Mac, and it's still compatible with all my old Office files.I am a .Net programmer at work and go home to a Mac. One of my dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft loving co-workers gave me a squinty-eyed look when I told him about my Mini. He was convinced I did myself a disservice by buying a machine that "no one supports" and "has no software". I almost laugh myself silly when he asked if the keyboard had function keys
Oooh, I wish I'd have thought of that sooner. NeoOffice. It's free and works great.You know, I'm not an expert (obviously, since I just got the damn thing), but that whole "no one supports/has no software" thing seems like a really out-dated attitude. I think one of the biggest selling features of the new Macs is just how compatible they are with a lot of Microsoft files. I got iWorks instead of Office for my Mac, and it's still compatible with all my old Office files.I am a .Net programmer at work and go home to a Mac. One of my dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft loving co-workers gave me a squinty-eyed look when I told him about my Mini. He was convinced I did myself a disservice by buying a machine that "no one supports" and "has no software". I almost laugh myself silly when he asked if the keyboard had function keys
My challenge right now is finding a replacement for Quicken. Quicken is such garbage that it won't even produce an export file even though I've performed all of the proper steps. My version of Quicken is really old, too, so they won't support it. My web searched have yielded results showing that their customer support is lackluster on these issues as well.
Here are some links a friend gave me:
http://db.tidbits.com/
http://www.macintouch.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com/
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
and the ever-popular:
http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa
