New computer - goodbye Dell!

[TritonGlenn]

Dude! I got rid of a Dell!



Finally got fed up with the bandaids I'm putting on a aging (5 years) Dell. Stopped by the Apple store a few minutes ago with my old Dell and bought a new 27" IMac. They are transferring all the files, pics, etc... from the Dell and I pick it up tomorrow evening. Cost me half of what that Dell XPS400 originally cost, and it's a smokin' machine. The Dell officially becomes my six-year olds personnal computer as of 6pm tomorrow.



Having a GREAT day!



All the best,

Glenn

 

[Pat Ling]

That IMac is a smoking machine you'll love it.

 

[Dan J.]

SWEET!!! If you don't mind, get it broke in and give us your real world usage opinion. I keep swearing that I won't own another MS PC and then wind up getting one out of need for the office or just me being cheap. Within weeks I'm usually cussing my decision.

 

[Texas Transplant]

I work with someone that switched from a 'PC' to a 'Mac' a year ago. He swears by it, and has been a very long time windows/PC user.



I still think that the pricing is just too far out of touch for my tastes.



Glenn - if you had/have a 5 year old machine, it's more than time to upgrade. My rule is this: 'If you are happy with what you paid (or will pay) and happy with the unit that you are getting', then that's all you need to worry about.



Just a word of caution, don't believe all the hype about 'Mac's never having an OS or other type of problem'. They all do.



Tex

 

[Jim B]

"Just a word of caution, don't believe all the hype about 'Mac's never having an OS or other type of problem'. They all do"



Thats a very true statement but i can count on one hand the amount of times my macbook has had any type of OS or application crash in the two and a half eyars i have had it and still have fingers leftover. Hardware there is always the possibility of it failing, hard drives for instance are generally sourced from two places, processors only two etc...



Glenn,

You will love that Mac once you get used to the subtle differences from Windows. If you have any questions let me know either here in email and i can help you. One suggestion i have is get yourself a big external hard drive and plug it in. When you do it will ask you if you want to use it for time machine backups. Click yes and the machine will do the rest. Time machine will take a full backup when you turn it on then it will do hourly incrementals as you use the computer. If you ever mess up a file or heaven forbid your hard drive fails you will have a solid backup and you wont need to sweat it, it operates totally seemless and you wont notice a thing. I have the time capsule to do wireless backups from my laptop and the one time i used it to do a restore is when i took out the 200gb drive that came in the laptop and put in the 500gb i have now. After i put the drive in i just booted from the os disk and told it to restore form backup and other then more space it was like nothing ever happened once it did the restore.

 

[Paul P]

Jim



Is the hard drive and backup software you are mentioning specific to Macs? I have a bunch of Windows PC's in the house for work and personal and I am looking for a simple backup strategy for files and disk image.



Thanks



Paul

 

[Mini]

Paul,



Maxtor makes a line of external hard drives called a one touch. All you ave to do is hit the button on the face of teh drive and it starts a backup routine.

 

[Jim B]

Paul, the time machine software is specific to mac. Its built into the operating system. A hard disk is just that, they are generic.



Windows 7 and Vista have a backup utility in them as well that will create a full system image as well as file backups. Its not a constant backup like the time machine, it's run on a weekly or daily type schedule so you will need to have the machines running at specefic times to get the backups done. It works pretty good you just have to set the schedule to work for you.

 

[Paul P]

Thanks Jim. I'll look into using that and buying an external drive that I can just add to my network.

 

[Texas Transplant]

I use a MyBook storage device that came with Memeo auto backup software. While it won't 'image' your disk, it will do full, incremental, etc, etc backups without effecting your productivity much. It runs in the background, and I have the full backups scheduled at night.



It has already saved us once when my wife's laptop had to have a new hard drive. Didn't lose any files at all, and it was a piece of cake.



Note: I had to buy the PRO version of Memeo since when I got my laptop it didn't support the 64bit version of Windows I was running.



I have a good friend that is an IT Professional that has a recommendation for 'disk image' software. I'll get it and post also (when I hear from him).



Tex

 

[Jim B]

If i was to do a third party one on Windows that will take a full disk image Acronis True Image would be the one.

 

[TritonGlenn]

Jim B,

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into that soon, but at the present time, I'm fairly broke from this purchase. . This one came with a 1tb drive. Never had a computer with this much space. I'm lovin' the all-in-1 setup, as my desk is now completely clear and I have tons of room for open textbooks, etc... Getting used to the differences, and although I've started to get frustrated now and then, when I finally figure it out, I realize that it's much more efficient than my old setup. Re-learning PowerPoint tonight, as there are several differences, but I'm liking them all. Something as simple as "crop" took me a few minutes to figure out, but once I did, I liked it better. It seems so odd to be using a computer and not hear that little tower fan in the background. It's almost TOO quiet in my office! Ha! I'm sure I'll run into snags, but right now, I wish I had this years ago. Lovin' it!

All the best,

Glenn

 

[Roy Cody]

Do a search for "Synctoy". It is one of those little programs created by the Microsoft folks that hasn't been added to the basic operationg systems.



I like it because it is very simple to use.



RoyC

 

[Tom W]

Glenn congrats on the iMac. Once you buy an Apple computer there is no going back. Hope you will be as pleased as I was on the purchase of mine.



Tom