MK5 Golf GTI
General => Random Chat => Topic started by: DaveB@Vagbremtechnic on May 01, 2010, 09:48:21 am
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My trusty 3 1/2 year old Toshiba Satellite pro has died....
I can get VAT free macs from Jersey so which one.
Requirements:
1. Good sized hard drive for my steam train video collection :love:
2. Web Browsing & web mail
3. DVD Playback
4. Not too big
5. Not too expensive
6. Play a couple of games maybe
7. I have some RSA SecurID tokens on my lappy is this software compatible with Mac?
Recommends please
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you should just go for the macbook http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook?mco=MTM3NDc3Njc
i use a quad core G5 at work fully specced up with 8 gig of ram and a tera bite hard drive and although its capable of doing a lot i think my 4 year old macbook is more than enough with its lowly 2gb ram and 80gb hard drive. its more than enough to run photoshop 4 and illustrator while browsing the web and listening to tunes. no point going over kill with a pro as its not cheap and the basic one is more than up to the job :happy2:
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7. I have some RSA SecurID tokens on my lappy is this software compatible with Mac?
I'm not a Mac user but I think the first 6 are straightforward.
No.7 may be interesting though. Are they VPN clients or similar? If so I guess it depends whether there are Mac equivalents.
Failing that either dual boot to WIndows on VMWare will be your answer. :smiley:
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Go for the mac - you will look back and wonder what took you so long!
P.S windows is the dark side :laugh:
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Go for the mac - you will look back and wonder what took you so long!
P.S windows is the dark side :laugh:
WORD. :pomppomp:
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Go for the mac - you will look back and wonder what took you so long!
P.S windows is the dark side :laugh:
Unfortunately its a necessary evil. :P
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Go for the mac - you will look back and wonder what took you so long!
P.S windows is the dark side :laugh:
Unfortunately its a necessary evil. :P
don't forget if you must waste part of your macs HD :booty: you can bootcamp windows and it will run it better than any sub £1000 windows machines
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:indifferent:
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you dont want just DVD playback, get your self a blueray disc drive on it, then you can watch proper HD, and also plug the laptop into a HD TV via HDMI and watch blueray that way.
Did it with the avatar film last night, unbelievable quality
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Noooo! Don't fall to the dark side! Windows 7 is teh futur! Do not give in to the Cult!
/runs away mumbling about communists, long-hairs and hippies
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Currently, Apple’s stock is at an all time high. A share today is worth over 40 times its value seven years ago. So, how much would you have today if you purchased stock instead of an Apple product?
The Apple PowerBook G3 250 was released on Nov 10, 1997 for £3712 If you bought £3712 worth of Apple stock instead of that PowerBook, that stock would be worth about £215,308 today.
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7. I have some RSA SecurID tokens on my lappy is this software compatible with Mac?
I'm not a Mac user but I think the first 6 are straightforward.
No.7 may be interesting though. Are they VPN clients or similar? If so I guess it depends whether there are Mac equivalents.
Failing that either dual boot to WIndows on VMWare will be your answer. :smiley:
VMWare fusion running XP on the Mac for RSA stuff is how I get around this, works a treat :happy2:
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you dont want just DVD playback, get your self a blueray disc drive on it, then you can watch proper HD, and also plug the laptop into a HD TV via HDMI and watch blueray that way.
Did it with the avatar film last night, unbelievable quality
Thats an expensive way of watching Blu-Ray :confused: :confused:
Why not just buy a Blu-Ray player for around £300 :P
@Dave - A macbook like the one linked by NB07 should suit your needs just fine.
Honestly once you convert you will wonder why it took you so long. The only reason i have VMWare Fusion 3 is for VCDS, REVO Select Plus and a couple of work things otherwise i wouldn't bother.
Carl :happy2:
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Noooo! Don't fall to the dark side! Windows 7 is teh futur! Do not give in to the Cult!
/runs away mumbling about communists, long-hairs and hippies
Agreed!
I'm a designer which means I'm supposed to worship Macs. I have both on my desk at work and I rarely even turn the Mac on.
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Thats an expensive way of watching Blu-Ray :confused: :confused:
Why not just buy a Blu-Ray player for around £300 :P
Carl :happy2:
Because he needs a new laptop, and wants it to watch films on etc, plus with the blueray option you can hit two birds with one stone without having to spend 300 sheets on a new blueray player as well.
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i use a quad core G5 at work fully specced up with 8 gig of ram and a tera bite hard drive and although its capable of doing a lot i think my 4 year old macbook is more than enough with its lowly 2gb ram and 80gb hard drive. its more than enough to run photoshop 4 and illustrator while browsing the web and listening to tunes. no point going over kill with a pro as its not cheap and the basic one is more than up to the job :happy2:
....That's exactly what I've got at home but my daughter's MacBook Pro 17" performs just as well. New big iMac for me........ When I stop spending on my car!
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Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:
(https://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.macworld.com%2Fimages%2Flegacy%2F2004%2F10%2Fimages%2Fcontent%2Fimac4.gif&hash=2de56def0017b10588816a61ef61b5b8b3c4369e)
It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.
Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.
But hey. Think different, right?
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^^^^
@ cmdrfire:
Tee-Hee! :snigger:
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cmdrfire: High-five! :grin:
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cmdrfire: High-five! :grin:
*virtual five!*
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Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:
(https://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.macworld.com%2Fimages%2Flegacy%2F2004%2F10%2Fimages%2Fcontent%2Fimac4.gif&hash=2de56def0017b10588816a61ef61b5b8b3c4369e)
It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.
Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.
But hey. Think different, right?
Actually it's not that difficult...
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf
The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.
I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).
:P
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Psh, here's something for you Macaholics. My mum's got an Intel dual-core iMac 4, like this:
(https://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.macworld.com%2Fimages%2Flegacy%2F2004%2F10%2Fimages%2Fcontent%2Fimac4.gif&hash=2de56def0017b10588816a61ef61b5b8b3c4369e)
It's suffered a hard disk drive failure.
Were it a normal computer, i.e., one not built by a money-hungry egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, I would be able to happily remove the hdd, put it in a caddy and connect it to my machine where I could assault the drive with a vast and bewildering array of tools to recover all the data. I could also buy a nice 1TB hdd and use that as a replacement.
Because it's not a normal computer, I can't do any of that; I either have to go through a nightmarish disassembly procedure (because, y'know, Apple don't really care about serviceability or longevity - "it's broken? just buy a new one!") or give it to Apple so some Mactard "genius" can tell me to buy a new one and then gleefully overcharge me for a repair. Which still won't have recovered the data off the hdd.
But hey. Think different, right?
Actually it's not that difficult...
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf
The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.
I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).
:P
You will need some software like Mac Drive to access a Mac formatted drive on a PC though.
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Actually it's not that difficult...
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_HardDrive.pdf
The reason for the "tricky disassembly" is due to the packaging, the same is true for Dell and HP all-in-one machines, there is no other way to build these sort of units unfortunately, just think of it as a big laptop with a screen. They use standard 3.5" SATA drives by the way, so guess what? You can retrofit a nice 1TB drive after all, you just need to reinstall the OS from CD once you fit the new drive. Oh, and then you can put the old drive in a caddy and try to retrieve the data too. All pretty straightforward really.
I would also point out that I bet you haven't had to touch that Mac since your Mum bought it, admit it, if it was a PC you would have been over there to sort it out every couple of months (I speak from experience here, which is why my parents have an iMac).
:P
It's still a damn nuisance, and I don't know how applicable that takedown guide is (that's for a G5, this is an Intel Mac which has a slightly different layout... should be similar though). Not got time to do that at the moment either (got exams this week :surprised: )
Also, I have had to keep fiddling with that Mac over the past couple of years of ownership because some applications (like iTunes) randomly hang; the well-renowned "Flash" problem means that Safari keeps dying; and it has trouble interfacing with the rest of the house network, so it doesn't like accessing our NAS via SMB which means that pulling media off the server is problematic at best.
animal's got a good point too, if it was a normal machine more likely than not I'd have formatted the drive in NTFS. As it is I'm going to have to do something or other to pull that data...
Still not quite as easy as you make out!
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Those early Intel iMacs have a pretty much identical layout to the G5 units, so that guide should work just fine for your Mum's iMac.
I have no idea why you are having problems with iTunes and Flash, what OS is it running? Snow Leopard only costs £25, so definitely worth upgrading if you haven't already as that should fix any issues like this. My Mac Mini is of a similar vintage and I have not had any of the problems you describe. As for communicating with the network in your house I fail to see why this is an issue, I can access my NAS from my Mac via SMB just as easily as I can via Windows or Linux??
A "normal" machine would not necessarily have drives formatted as NTFS, they might be FAT, or they might be EXT2 or EXT3 depending on the operating system (Windows or Linux). The only reason you need a bit of software for your PC to read the drive is because Windows does not ship with the ability to read multiple drive formats, only NTFS and FAT. So, you would have to do the same thing even if it was a standard Dell PC running Linux - In other words, this is not a Mac specific issue.
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PS - Whilst you have the iMac open it is a good opportunity to upgrade the RAM and, if you are feeling particularly adventurous you could upgrade the CPU as well. I did this with my Mac Mini (similar vintage to that iMac) a couple of years ago, it isn't that expensive to do and it makes a huge difference, particularly worth doing if the iMac is going to be running Snow Leopard.
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Those early Intel iMacs have a pretty much identical layout to the G5 units, so that guide should work just fine for your Mum's iMac.
I have no idea why you are having problems with iTunes and Flash, what OS is it running? Snow Leopard only costs £25, so definitely worth upgrading if you haven't already as that should fix any issues like this. My Mac Mini is of a similar vintage and I have not had any of the problems you describe. As for communicating with the network in your house I fail to see why this is an issue, I can access my NAS from my Mac via SMB just as easily as I can via Windows or Linux??
A "normal" machine would not necessarily have drives formatted as NTFS, they might be FAT, or they might be EXT2 or EXT3 depending on the operating system (Windows or Linux). The only reason you need a bit of software for your PC to read the drive is because Windows does not ship with the ability to read multiple drive formats, only NTFS and FAT. So, you would have to do the same thing even if it was a standard Dell PC running Linux - In other words, this is not a Mac specific issue.
Cheers for the guide. Doesn't stop it from being a nuisance. But a "normal" machine would be formatted as NTFS primarily because I would've built it and installed the OS myself :P
Think I will upgrade the RAM while I'm in there.
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Definitely install Snow Leopard on the new drive when you install it as well, it will probably sort out some of the niggles you mentioned earlier.
For the record, I'm no Mac evangelist, in fact I can't stand Mac evangelists and I have more PCs than Macs at home. However, I don't think changing a drive on an iMac is really that much of a big deal, personally I quite enjoyed the challenge of upgrading my Mac Mini!
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Definitely install Snow Leopard on the new drive when you install it as well, it will probably sort out some of the niggles you mentioned earlier.
For the record, I'm no Mac evangelist, in fact I can't stand Mac evangelists and I have more PCs than Macs at home. However, I don't think changing a drive on an iMac is really that much of a big deal, personally I quite enjoyed the challenge of upgrading my Mac Mini!
Sssh, I need something to argue with Robin about don't I?!
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Good point, well made.
:happy2:
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Sssh, I need something to argue with Robin about don't I?!
....Stop being such a drama queen! :evilgrin: :grin: