moki
el Presidente
Macs really are not expensive, they just come with an awful lot of "standard equipment" -- price out equivalent machines, and the premium for a Mac is not much at all. And worth it, IMHO.
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Bought an iMac
- Thread starter Rod
- Start date
Macs really are not expensive, they just come with an awful lot of "standard equipment" -- price out equivalent machines, and the premium for a Mac is not much at all. And worth it, IMHO.
Marcos
I love you Rocky & Sammie and Bee...thank you
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2006
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Myself as well. I can't wait.
MiamiCubano
El Martillo (My Boxing Name)
Congrats Rod!! :thumbs:
Honestly, after my recent absolute pleasure with getting my iPod, I am going to be making the switch to Mac soon too. I've had it with PC after many, many years.
Honestly, after my recent absolute pleasure with getting my iPod, I am going to be making the switch to Mac soon too. I've had it with PC after many, many years.
moki
el Presidente
If any of you nOObs need help, just ask. Some quick pointers:
-- Switching info to ease your mind: http://www.apple.com/getamac/
-- Good place to find free/shareware software: http://www.macupdate.com/ and also http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ and also http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
-- There is no real adware software, so don't worry about installing things
-- There is no real reason to have virus checking software installed
-- To delete an application you no longer want, just drag it to the trash (generally no need for an uninstaller)
-- Good news sites: http://www.macminute.com/ and http://www.tuaw.com/ and http://www.macnn.com/ and numerous others
-- Apple support/info library: http://www.apple.com/support/
-- Good place for techy hints: http://www.macosxhints.com/
-- Yes, your two button mouse or scrollwheel mouse will work on MacOS X, just plug it in
For Rod and other Unix geeks:
++ Install the Developer tools (comes free with the OS, but isn't installed by default) and you get gcc, gdb, etc.
++ php, perl, and an entire BSD layer is part of the OS, as is Apache
++ Go to System Preferences->Sharing and check "Personal Web Sharing" -- the starts Apache up (same as apachectl start)
++ Similarly, "Remote login" turns on sshd
++ /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app is your friend
++ There is a free X11 server as well, if you want it, just install it
-- Switching info to ease your mind: http://www.apple.com/getamac/
-- Good place to find free/shareware software: http://www.macupdate.com/ and also http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ and also http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
-- There is no real adware software, so don't worry about installing things
-- There is no real reason to have virus checking software installed
-- To delete an application you no longer want, just drag it to the trash (generally no need for an uninstaller)
-- Good news sites: http://www.macminute.com/ and http://www.tuaw.com/ and http://www.macnn.com/ and numerous others
-- Apple support/info library: http://www.apple.com/support/
-- Good place for techy hints: http://www.macosxhints.com/
-- Yes, your two button mouse or scrollwheel mouse will work on MacOS X, just plug it in
For Rod and other Unix geeks:
++ Install the Developer tools (comes free with the OS, but isn't installed by default) and you get gcc, gdb, etc.
++ php, perl, and an entire BSD layer is part of the OS, as is Apache
++ Go to System Preferences->Sharing and check "Personal Web Sharing" -- the starts Apache up (same as apachectl start)
++ Similarly, "Remote login" turns on sshd
++ /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app is your friend
++ There is a free X11 server as well, if you want it, just install it
Infinity
Infinity - *Unbounded space, time, or quantity*
Andrew, are you suggesting that I install XP as a matter of course because it will make it easier to migrate?
Doesn't that put me in the same position as I am now, pissed off with windows? Every computer I have ever used
slows down in time as windows gets congested, or whatever it does.
Brian
moki
el Presidente
Nah, I'm suggesting that you can install XP and have it run on top of MacOS X if you find the need to... but I doubt you'll find the need to. If you use Parallels to do it, it runs in a "sandbox"
MrJerry
Your Coffee Guy!
Congrats Rod!
My older iMac died on December 23rd...DAMN.
Went out and got the same iMac as you, 20" for me. And we've got two Mac Mini's as well as a G4.
Life is good!!
My older iMac died on December 23rd...DAMN.
Went out and got the same iMac as you, 20" for me. And we've got two Mac Mini's as well as a G4.
Life is good!!
jgohlke
My other hobby
We've been migrating to the Mac for about a year. My son was first and my wife followed with her own iMac about 6 months ago. I just switched last month when I bought a Macbook from the Apple store (refurbished). We managed to switch over just about everything, except for our checkbooks. We both run MS Money and it isn't available for the Mac. I've been playing with Quicken, but don't know enough about it to decide to switch or not.
We were longtime PC users, but have recently had some problems with our XP licenses. While we own multiple licenses for the XP operating system one of them is an upgrade (from an upgrade of Win2000 from an OEM NT install). The other XP license is from an OEM install by Toshiba for a laptop. It's for a very early version of XP and has to be installed and then update itself over the internet (no shortcuts allowed in this process)...I've did this twice last year....It took 9 hours one time and about 6 hours the second time...with just enough keypresses sprinkled in that it would take 2 days if I didn't watch it. Add the time it took to deinstall all the "crapware" plus the time to get everything back to normal...it just put me over the edge. I'm tired of being a beta tester for Microsoft and I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. I just couldn't make the "Vista" commitment.
We investigated several Linux distributions; Ubuntu, Suse and Redhat, but none of them support wireless very well (we run a WPA-encrypted wireless network, plus a wired LAN here at the house). I use Redhat at work a lot (that and Solaris) but no wireless. I was all set to really like one of them, but it didn't work out....the whole "add these patches, download this software, fix this code and recompile your kernel" is just way too much to do for a laptop to surf the web and check my email.
Our first Mac software purchase was MS Office. It looks nice, but it is slow compared to my PC (the PC is 6 years old!). I later found out that many Mac applications don't run natively on the new Intel chips, but run some kind of middle software (Rosetta)...they run, but performance isn't great. Somebody can probably explain this better, but just a heads up...all the Mac software is not created equally.
My son installed Eclipse and he uses that to do his school programming assignments. I haven't installed any of that stuff yet and not sure I wll. We did throw a giant drive in the old PC and now mostly use it as a cheapie NAS box.
Other stuff is very cool...widgets are fun, wireless just works....installing/deinstalling software is very easy. On my Macbook, I can get almost 4 hours of battery life for surfing the web. I can't smoke that many cigars back-to-back!
Thanks to Moki for the links, I'm going to check them out.
We were longtime PC users, but have recently had some problems with our XP licenses. While we own multiple licenses for the XP operating system one of them is an upgrade (from an upgrade of Win2000 from an OEM NT install). The other XP license is from an OEM install by Toshiba for a laptop. It's for a very early version of XP and has to be installed and then update itself over the internet (no shortcuts allowed in this process)...I've did this twice last year....It took 9 hours one time and about 6 hours the second time...with just enough keypresses sprinkled in that it would take 2 days if I didn't watch it. Add the time it took to deinstall all the "crapware" plus the time to get everything back to normal...it just put me over the edge. I'm tired of being a beta tester for Microsoft and I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. I just couldn't make the "Vista" commitment.
We investigated several Linux distributions; Ubuntu, Suse and Redhat, but none of them support wireless very well (we run a WPA-encrypted wireless network, plus a wired LAN here at the house). I use Redhat at work a lot (that and Solaris) but no wireless. I was all set to really like one of them, but it didn't work out....the whole "add these patches, download this software, fix this code and recompile your kernel" is just way too much to do for a laptop to surf the web and check my email.
Our first Mac software purchase was MS Office. It looks nice, but it is slow compared to my PC (the PC is 6 years old!). I later found out that many Mac applications don't run natively on the new Intel chips, but run some kind of middle software (Rosetta)...they run, but performance isn't great. Somebody can probably explain this better, but just a heads up...all the Mac software is not created equally.
My son installed Eclipse and he uses that to do his school programming assignments. I haven't installed any of that stuff yet and not sure I wll. We did throw a giant drive in the old PC and now mostly use it as a cheapie NAS box.
Other stuff is very cool...widgets are fun, wireless just works....installing/deinstalling software is very easy. On my Macbook, I can get almost 4 hours of battery life for surfing the web. I can't smoke that many cigars back-to-back!
Thanks to Moki for the links, I'm going to check them out.
moki
el Presidente
Here's a quick explanation: Apple transitioned from the PowerPC architecture to Intel chips starting in 2005. Software written for PPC machines continues to work on new Intel machines, but it runs in an emulation layer. Microsoft Office is a product that Microsoft hasn't updated yet to be Intel native, so it won't run as a fast as native software.
Microsoft has however announced Microsoft Office 2008, which is Intel native, and will be shipping later on this year.
He could do his work in XCode as well, it's a development environment that runs on top of gcc, gdb, etc. It came with your machine, you just need to install it.
jgohlke
My other hobby
Thanks, I didn't know about the new release. It might be worth upgrading. We picked MS Office because we knew how to use it and it seemed like a good idea to have something familiar on the Mac to get us going. In retrospect, it wasn't the best choice because of the performance issues and it soured our attitude a bit. I sought some help from a Mac forum and didn't get totally flamed (the Mac fanboys can be a vicious lot), but didn't get much help either. We bumped the memory from 512 to 1G but it didn't really help. In the end, we just got over it and the other stuff the Mac does well eventually won us over.
I'll tell my son about Xcode (he'll be surprised I know something about the Mac that he doesn't)....we picked Eclipse because I know how to use it and I could walk him through the debugger (he was coding in Java).
There are a ton of applications that I don't even know what they do. It could take a while to figure them all out. I'm still having some trouble synching my Treo 650, but our camera synchs just find with iPhoto. It is pretty to cool to open a terminal and be in Linux. I wrote a couple of short shell scripts just for the thrill of not having to write them in batch!
Rod - didn't mean to hijack your thread. Hope you enjoy it, I'm sure you will. That 24" monitor is a monster!
I'll tell my son about Xcode (he'll be surprised I know something about the Mac that he doesn't)....we picked Eclipse because I know how to use it and I could walk him through the debugger (he was coding in Java).
There are a ton of applications that I don't even know what they do. It could take a while to figure them all out. I'm still having some trouble synching my Treo 650, but our camera synchs just find with iPhoto. It is pretty to cool to open a terminal and be in Linux. I wrote a couple of short shell scripts just for the thrill of not having to write them in batch!
Rod - didn't mean to hijack your thread. Hope you enjoy it, I'm sure you will. That 24" monitor is a monster!
moki
el Presidente
We of course own Microsoft Office, but I almost never use it. Generally I just need to read Word documents, and TextEdit will actually open formatted .doc documents.
As for RAM, I actually recommend 2gb for most people. Yes, I know, it sounds excessive, but RAM is relatively cheap, especially if you buy it from places like http://www.crucial.com/
For Java work, he'll probably still want to use Eclipse. XCode is for C/C++/Objective-C, and assorted other languages.
Yeah having the Unix layer is a nice thing. For synching your Treo, you'll want to pick up The Missing Sync from MarkSpace:
http://www.markspace.com/missingsync_palmos.php
A number of my friends use Treo's and swear by it; it works great.
MarkSpace sells other synching products that work very well too.