Mac users! Where are you?

[wase4711]

I just bought my wife one of those exact Imacs, and its truly awesum..the hi gloss screen is stunning, and, its almost as fast as my Mac Pro!

You need to dump those shoeboxes dude, and just take the plunge..I haven't missed Wintel crap at all, and I haven't had a single instance when I couldn't find a Mac proggie that wouldn't do what I needed done...
I reboot about every 10 days, just because I think I should, NEVER a hang up, there is no BSOD, no Virus, no spyware, no registry issues, little if any maintenance, the list goes on and on..

[rikytik]

This is a great reply wase. Gave me a good chuckle. I know I'll go the big 24" iMac, but for silly reasons I'm taking my time getting there.

I'll visit my kids in Italy in August and was planning on dropping off my 2 month old Lenovo Thinkpad (upgraded to a MacBook chez moi) to replace an Acer Ferrari I left my daughter in 2004. My daughter, unlike my sister, isn't interested in new stuff. Nor is my son-in-law who has his own WinXP desktop. They just got DSL last month, for crying out loud. They live in a small village in the suburbs of Catania, Sicily. About 3,000 ft elevation on the foothills of Mt. Etna.

[rikytik]

Question Wase.

Do you consider the iMac servicable by yourself. For example, replacing a HD or Optical drive?

Did you buy the Apple service coverage?

[wase4711]

make sure you take pictures, and post them via your .nac account so I can see them!!
learning all this new stuff keeps our minds acitve, and I know that is important for old farts like us!!

As far as servicing an Imac, NO, all you can do is add memory; the rest has to be done by pros...

We bought service plans for my Mac Pro, and the Imac, but not for the laptop..

You should probably get a Mac Pro, as it is TOTALLY serviceable by you or me, and its so easy to replace stuff, or add stuff, you wouldnt even believe it..
It took about 20 seconds to add a Terrabyte Hard drive to the thing, and there was NO CONFIGURATION WHATSOEVER...I Turned on the machine, and it was there, and recognized...no screws, no rails, it just slid in and clicked, and that was it..
memory is even easier..

I can't believe I didnt do this years ago...

[User Needs]

Moving this to All things Mac

[rikytik]

Whoa! I had not bothered checking out the Mac Pro. Wow! That's a nice piece of gear. I don't really want a big 24" iMac. I'd rather have a computer box, plus a big screen. But, the bux for the Mac Pro is too much for me at this time. Undeterred, today I bought a Mac-Mini. The upgraded version: 2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB SATA drive. It's got wi-fi, bluetooth, 4 usb ports, and DVD burner all in a box the size of an external USB drive case. I'm using it with my wireless Logitec KB/Mouse and my external 19" LCD monitor via a 2 port KVM, so that I can also run the WinXP box that will eventually be decommisioned. I've got it pretty much setup and am totally impressed by this little 2.5 pound box that makes a pretty nice small footprint computer. After I digest buying my sister a MacBook and the 24" iMac, along with my own MacBook, I'll figure out the next step, if there is one. I'm going to be getting rid of 3 xp boxes and all those shoe boxes of parts I've collected over past years.

The Apple Store really hums here. Full all the time with people, whereas the Sony Store is like a morgue.

[wase4711]

yeah, my wife wanted the compact size of the Imac, and its really nice and small for her; for me, I have a 30inch Dell monitor, so I wanted a seperate box to hook it up to.

That mini sounds really cool; can you add RAM to it, or is it sealed up?

Its amazing how much faster, and how many things you can run with no slow down at all on these things. My wife only has 2 gigs of RAM, but yesterday she had Photoshop, light room, Iphoto, Ilife, I tunes, email, 12 web Browsers, and all sorts of other shit running, and you couldn't even tell on her machine..imagine doing that with Vista!

Plus, we bought the cheapo laptop, and its SO MUCH faster than my high end windows Toshiba I sold, plus the battery life is 3 times as long..

I gotta believe if 100 people actually tried out Mac stuff, 85 would dump windows in a heartbeat...

[rikytik]

The Mac mini has 2 GB max.

Got all my Outlook Contacts into the Mac Address Book OK.
Still fussing with my BookMarks which are all in acqURL.

Apart from that things are looking pretty good.

[wase4711]

never heard of acqurl, but it should be easy to import them..

[rikytik]

Used acqURL for years, but exporting is a problem.

I bought a WD Book 1 TB drive today to use as the Time Machine back up. I'm thinking to put all my jpg, music and doc archives there so they can be easily kept up to date.

All my archives are on NTFS HD's. If I understand, Mac can read NTFS, but can't write to it. I've always synced my archives to a redundant backup with Vice Versa, a great program. Second Copy is perhaps better known.

Is there a similar program for Mac? What I mean is, suppose you keep all your new jpg's, mp3's and other items in your personal files on the Mac, then want to back them up to an external disk, but update only the files that have changed. Is that a Time Machine job? or some other program?

Anyhow, I'm totally converted to email on the Mac and have put my favorite ACDSee program into a Virtual Machine in Parallels, just in case. I like Parallels better than Fusion, btw.

iTunes will sync with Address Book, but I doubt my HP 614c PDA will. Still some rought edges to figure out.