Gosh, it's on!

[pandorasblog]

I'd misunderstood the LJ mail and thought it was going off now, but turns out it'll be 8.00am Pacific, not Eastern time, which means 4pm GMT rather than 1pm. And since it's 1pm now and I have a bitch of a computer crisis and need advice, that is a very, very good thing.

Comments

[starlaborne]

ack i really wish i could help you out here because i too, recently moved from PC to iMac, but i am that dumb, i am still trying to figure out basics with my mac!

just be careful that you don't end up needing to bring your mac to an expect because he/she may refuse to fix the problems for you, if they see that you had already tampered with it yourself. this is because someone i know had a similar problem & he tried fixing it himself, which resulted in the mac expert then refusing to fix it.

i'm not saying this is going to happen you, but just be careful.

& enjoy learning how to work your new mac! i love mine, but there is still so much i need to learn.

[starlaborne]

oh yes, & i too, bought iWorks for my mac, for £55 from PC world. it's a fantastic package. i would stay clear off installing windows onto mac. it takes up way too much space & there is absolutely no need for it. just buy yourself a copy of iWorks. it's so much better than microsoft works anyway.

[dfordoom]

Why would you want to put Windows on a Mac? You buy a Mac so you never ever have to use Windows again! ;-)

iWorks is cool, isn't it? And that's the only software I needed to buy. Everything else, graphics programs, all that stuff, was all there on the Mac.

I don't miss Windows at all!

[starlaborne]

lol i've no idea what i was thinking when i put windows onto the first mac i got a couple of months ago. (there was this deal on macwarehouse.co.uk for £900 where i got windows XP installed too. at the time i didn't realise what a silly idea this was & how much space it used up!) but anyway, that mac then broke on me a few days later so i returned it & bought one close to where i live, instead of buying online. so i decided to go with iWorks instead, which is great! it's so handy with all the templates for brochures etc, because i have my own photography business. so that's handy. :)

so you were happy enough with the graphics programs, without deciding to install a copy of photoshop? to be honest, i haven't really tried out the graphics software, but i am currently installing photoshop CS4 because that is the one program i would only work with for editing my images.

& i agree, i no longer miss windows at all any more either!

[dfordoom]

If you're seriously into photography you'd probably need something like photoshop.

[starlaborne]

yeah, that was my thought exactly. the iPhoto is cool enough too, though, for making calendars etc. but i don't think you can beat photoshop.

[dfordoom]

There's also a package called iLife, about the same price as iWorks, that apparently includes more advanced versions of the standard Mac applications such as iPhoto, iMovies, iDVD, etc. I haven't bought it, but it looks interesting.

The only thing Macs are useless for is playing DVDs, because you can't play multi-region DVDs, so if you live in Australia you're limited to the truly pathetic range of Region 4 DVDs. So now I just use my old PC as a DVD player - because playing DVDs is the only thing it CAN do successfully! And because it's no longer connected to the internet I no longer have to bother with the nightmares of antivirus and antispyware software. Plus I have three ordinary multi-region DVD players, so it's not a big problem for me.

[pandorasblog]

Do you mean that you can't switch it from one region to another (eg, to give yourself a Region 1) player, or that you can't make it non-region specific and play all regions' DVDs? We'd thought of switching the MacBook to R1...

[dfordoom]

No, if it has a Matshita drive (as my iMac does) you're stuck with one region forever. It's a hardware thing, and apparently there's no way around it. You can switch it a couple of times, then it locks forever. If I'd known that, I would never have bought the iMac. Region coding is evil, evil, evil.

Luckily region-free DVD players are dirt cheap. You can buy one here for the equivalent of about twelve pounds. And luckily the PC still plays DVDs, and it has software that makes it region-free.

[pandorasblog]

Oh yeah, I know so little that I'd never be tempted to tamper with anything that was already on there. I've e-mailed a friend who seems to know quite a bit about Macs so I'm hoping he'll have some insight, and I will definitely look into iWorks if it isn't on there somewhere already. I think they just got it in Rem's office and he seems to like it...

[scrr]

It's Pages you can open Word documents with... It's installed (since I used it to type the texts in for the speaky-thing).

Also, perhaps your USB stick is full, because you've moved stuff to the trash-can, but did not empty that (basically, putting it in the trash means "scheduled for deletion", but it's still on the USB-stick). So, put it in the bin & empty bin.

We can have a look this weekend which stuff I've got on my Mac would also fit on the laptop.

[pandorasblog]

Also, perhaps your USB stick is full, because you've moved stuff to the trash-can, but did not empty that (basically, putting it in the trash means "scheduled for deletion", but it's still on the USB-stick). So, put it in the bin & empty bin.

Now, that's very interesting indeed. I never realised that the items were treated as still being on the stick until deleted from the trash can. Indeed, I haven't deleted today's batch of trash yet, so I'll try that shortly and see if it improves matters.