iMac 27

You can't install a second drive in an iMac. They offer an SSD+HDD option on the 27", I believe, but it's only a 2.5" bay for the SSD. Your 2TB drive won't fit.

You can upgrade RAM on your own, and should. NEVER buy RAM or HDDs from Apple.

What will you be doing with it? If you're doing real work, get the i7. If you're using it as just a home computer, an i5 would be more than enough.

Probably not, though at least wait for the 20th to see what new hardware/software are announced.


You're thinking of Parallels and VMWare.


Yes, it's called Boot Camp. Built into OS X, Boot Camp allows you to natively run Windows in its own partition. Pro: You get your machine's full power (computationally and graphically). Con: You can't run it side by side with OS X.

I hate virtualizing, but that may just be me. Boot Camp's also free. You can set up a Boot Camp partition and have Parallels read it, too. So if you want to quickly hop into Windows without rebooting, open Parallels and it'll boot from the dedicated partition.

Mac event. Likely iLife and iWork '11, as well as at least a redesigned/new MacBook Air.

iMacs are also due, I guess, so it's worth waiting.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...ober_20th.html

It sounds like you are going to way too much trouble for this. You don't have to keep reinstalling when you hit a problem like Time Machine backups. You also don't have to use Time Machine. There is a free program called Carbon Copy Cloner that will backup your data to an external drive:

http://www.bombich.com/

It will make the external bootable too. Your external drive only needs to be a bit bigger than the content you plan to have on the machine, it doesn't have to exceed the size of the drive itself.

If you have a 1TB drive but only use 200GB, you don't need larger than a 1TB backup drive. It's good to have about 50% extra to allow for getting new content though so even a 300GB drive would suffice if you have 200GB of data.

Time Machine backs up all your changes so uses up more space than the above program which keeps just the latest version.

If you are having problems backing up Parallels drives, you can exclude them from Time Machine using the Time Machine options:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h.../en/15622.html

You can back them up manually if you like or even use a shared folder and just back those up. It's good not to back them up because if you have created a 20GB Windows drive, every time you make a change to it, Time Machine thinks it's new so has to backup 20GB every single time, which is unnecessary.

How much space are you using on your internal drive? If it's less than 500GB, I'd suggest selling or returning your bulky 2TB drives, getting some money back for them and replacing them with much cheaper drives. Even portable bus-powered drives are enough for backups and you don't really have to keep them plugged in.

It wasn't a hardware fault though. You don't replace hardware when you have a software problem because if you got a replacement, it would do the same thing.


You will have experience working with computers and filesystems though so you should only weigh their suggestions into what makes sense to you.

If you look at the bottom of a Finder window when your main drive is selected or choose file > get info when the main drive is highlighted, it tells you how much space you are using. This is how much the computer is trying to backup so if you only have 200GB used and it is filling 1TB, you know something isn't right.

Look for your Parallels disk image and check what size it is. If it is 20GB and your backup is done daily, Time Machine will try to store incremental versions of those files so could store 14 x 20GB = 280GB after a week, which it doesn't need to do.

So, you just exclude the Parallels disk image from the Time Machine backup process and that should sort the issues. No more slow backups, no more filling the 1TB drive etc. There may be other large files doing a similar thing. If you have used over 600GB of your internal drive, don't use Time Machine, use the above program instead.

Support staff are paid to follow guidelines so they recommend what they are told to recommend as they are acting on behalf of the company. Their suggestions won't necessarily be the best ones in a given situation.

Are you trying to use Parallels in the same way you used your old PC? For example, did you create the Windows drive with a large size? Even if you had an old PC with a large hard drive, you wouldn't make the Parallels one a large size. You should only make it 50GB at most. You also shouldn't get into the habit of running Windows software that you used to use unless you absolutely can't find a Mac equivalent.

List all of the programs that you run under Windows and need to use Parallels for and people here can offer suggestions for Mac equivalents. You may not even need to use Parallels at all.

This would cause a backup problem even if it worked with Time Machine though. That 90GB of data is just one big file so it has to keep backing up the whole 90GB every day after you've run Parallels. There may be issues backing up the file format - that's been known to happen with some virtualization packages but either way, just excluding it from backup would work. Parallels should really do that on installation because there is no other way they can do it.

You do that in the Time Machine options, just add the folder containing the Parallels image file, which you can find in the Parallels settings. It will possibly be in /Users/carol/Documents/Parallels. Just exclude that folder if there is a 90GB file in there and your Time Machine shouldn't have a problem unless something else is happening with it.


There may not be an equivalent for that app - you can try GPSBabel:

http://www.gpsbabel.org/download.html

There's an alternative way of running Windows apps too besides a VM. Crossover simulates Windows in a way that allows some apps to run:

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

This may allow you to run POIEdit, save the files and sync with the native POILoader.

You can keep using Parallels if you like though, as I say if you exclude it from backup, it shouldn't affect anything else. It might be an idea to try shrinking the disk image though. 90GB is a lot of space to use for a single app.


In Carbon Copy Cloner, you would choose the internal drive on the left and external on the right and choose incremental backup. You can then exclude items from backup. You'll have to exclude Parallels from that backup too because it will do a similar thing. It won't backup multiple 90GB of data and make the space run out but it will backup 90GB every time, which is slow and unnecessary.

What is wrong if she buys the 13 inch core 2 duo and saves money also? It would be good for her.

The OP wanted a desktop! And she has already purchased it.

You really do make some weird posts Gerald.