considering buying Mac Help!
I notice the hard drives are ata100 but run at 4200 or 5400 rpm. Can you put a 7200 rpm regular w.d or maxtor drive in them, I am only familar with windows based system. Also I have a 1.8 mghz athalon now and am tired of windows crashes, is the g5 going to be faster or noticeably slower? I would guess it would be much better than a g-4. How hard is the transistion in learning the operating system? Thanks!
Comments
1. About hard drives: Macs use the exact same hard drives that PCs use. You can mix and match. The only difference is the format used. PCs use Fat32 or NTFS, and Macs use HFS+. All it means is that you have to reformat your drive before you can use it in a Mac.
Right now, all Apple laptops come with 4200 RPM hard drives, except you can BTO a 5400 RPM hard drive in some PowerBook models. Desktops all come with 7200 RPM hard drives, with the exception of the 1 GHz Combo eMac, which has a 5400 RPM 40 GB hard drive as standard equipment (it can be increased to an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive for $50). The G5s use Serial ATA, while the rest use normal ATA/66 or ATA/100.
2. It's hard to say if a Mac will be "faster" than an Athlon 1.8 GHz. The operating systems work differently. Windows might do things like resize and move windows faster, but the Mac will give you a more streamlined workflow which more than makes up for any slowness in the actual drawing of the GUI. A Mac should crash a lot less, which should make it "faster" in a sense.
3. The transition will be weird at first but I think you'll get used to it pretty quick. That's what the Mac is designed for after all - it's meant to get users on track quickly, doing what they need to do. And if you get stuck, you can always ask here for help. My only tip would be to try and clean up your punctuation and grammar a bit. I don't have a problem with slacking off in that area... but it's pretty tough to even understand your post because it's so bad.
Originally posted by fbdesigns
I notice the hard drives are ata100 but run at 4200 or 5400 rpm. Can you put a 7200 rpm regular w.d or maxtor drive in them.
Yes.
Also I have a 1.8 mghz athalon now and am tired of windows crashes, is the g5 going to be faster or noticeably slower?
Mostly way faster, but it depends on what you want to do. General use, you won't notice any lag on the G5 if you consider that fast. And it also depends what G5 you're talking about. The 1.6Ghz G5 is good, but the duals are going to be much much faster.
How hard is the transistion in learning the operating system? Thanks!
There will be some bad habits you'll need to unlearn, but Windows and OS X are pretty similar in a lot of ways. In general, there won't be a whole lot to have to relearn, except learning that the OS X way of installing and uninstalling programs - for the most part - is very different.
I am in the military and was considering getting the 17" G4 notebook. We got an activation notice 2 weeks ago for an all expenses paid trip to Iraq for 18 months 40 miles north of Bagdad in the sunai triangle. I found out today that they only needed 200 people instead of the intended 300 so I am staying.
With that said I am still tired of spending money on windows based systems. I had an old Amiga system to start.
I want the most for my money and now that the portabilaty issue is not really there I am considering a tower. The G5 would probably serve me better.
I have a Nikon 990 digital camera and take pictures for our national guard unit.
I am curious on how the dvd superdrive works and the programs that support it. I have over 300 legal dvds and would like to either backup on dvd or hard drive files. Do you know if there is anything software wise to do this in Mac?
Originally posted by fbdesigns
I had an old Amiga system to start.
I used to have an Amiga, A500, was nice.. I highly prefer OSX to windows. hate windows, switched to mac back in 98. work in IT. used to build my own machines, now I get nice machines built for me that are as stable as the ones I built(store brought machines I dont like on the pc side, not a lover of windows either).
hopefully next year may get 2 ibooks.
Originally posted by fbdesigns
I am curious on how the dvd superdrive works and the programs that support it. I have over 300 legal dvds and would like to either backup on dvd or hard drive files. Do you know if there is anything software wise to do this in Mac?
The intent of the burners is to burn original content you have filmed yourself onto a DVD. There may be some shady applications out there that would let you rip movies from a DVD, but I don't know of any for OS X.
I used to have some software that could do similar things on OS 9, so I would imagine that somebody has written something to do the same thing on OS X by now.
WRT the G5 machines, if you do get one, get a dual.
do a search for DVD2one