Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Love Affair Continues!

(Photo credit Declan TM)

All went according to plan and I got the playlist loaded onto the my iTunes on the Mac. Also loaded content to the podcasts and that was quick - I am really impressed by the speed of he Mac. Microsoft home edition Office 2007 has also been loaded and that all went smoothly. We bought two copies from Amazon as we thought we would each need a copy only to discover that the home edition comes with three licenses, so the unopened one is going back to Amazon. I have also loaded Evernote. I blogged about this programme and my thought about it versus OneNote. At that time I didn't have a Mac and I preferred OneNote because it was much better with inking. However the internet up-dating in Evernote is good and I am looking at it again as a method of sharing info and list between home and work.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

iTunes Fun

(Photo credit existentist)

In an effort to integrate my data onto my Macbook I decided to attack the age-old issue of transferring iTunes. I should say that I had a problem at work with the iTunes on my laptop. Although the data on the iTunes amounted to about 20GB the file was showing 37GB. As a result and because of space issues it had to be moved to an external portable hard drive. At the time I felt that there must be a simple answer, and when I set about transferring the files to the Macbook I discovered it. I download and watch a lot of videocasts, some up to 50 mins in length. Once I have watched them I delete them. They disappear from the podcast section and I fully delete them from the recycle bin. However I have discovered that iTunes still keeps a copy in the folder for that podcast. Hence the additional space being used! Anyway got the music and podcasts transferred, only slight issue is that according to the iTunes store I have now authorised 4 out of 5 of my allowed authorisations! I think I will need to find my old laptops and de-authorise them (if I can). The remaining issue is the playlists, although I think I may have solved that, will need to see if up-loading the text files works tonight!

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Apple Experience Continues


(Photo Credit halidCan!)

The great Mac experience continues. Ages ago I purchases a Seagate 500GB external drive, as we only had PC's at the time it was formatted in NTFS. I wanted to be able to use this storage with the new Macs, so I had to move the files and re-format the drive. In my research for the project I read a lot of horror stories about the process, however its as easy as pie. Formatted to FAT32 so that we can still use it with the PC's we have lying around, in various stages of sickness, and the new Macs. Re-formatting was quick and then moved files back and hey presto the Macbook sees the files. Great - now how long would such a process have taken with Vista and how many attempts would it have taken to get the job done? One can only speculate! Got Office for Mac on order, I know that's a bit anathema on an Apple machine but as we all know too many of the rest of world use Microsoft software and we need to be compatible.


Monday, November 17, 2008

Macbook

(photo credit Just a Guy who likes to take pictures)

What started as a quick run into town to look at a possible new computer for my partner resulted in us buying two Macbooks! My partner had been struggling with a Samsung Q1 (remember, one of the first umpc's), it has been gradually been getting slower and slower and the fan has stopped working - so it now closes down when it gets too hot. So a new computer was needed for an up-and-coming dissertation and general business admin. We discussed many options desktop/laptop/PC/Apple. As my partner is a keen iPhone user I knew that a Mac was going to be a possibility so off we went - just to have a look! We don't have the luxury of an Apple store near us, but we do have a re-seller. We had a look around and saw the new MacBook 13 inch titanium with LED screen - it was gorgeous. We chatted to the sales assistant about using Office on the Mac, and he mentioned that he had one of the old 13 inch white MacBooks left - highly spec'd and going for knock-down price of £700. So I ended up buying that one and my partner got the new titanium model. So from a zero mac household to a two Mac household in about an hour. As we bought two we got a very nice £30 sleeve thrown-in. Now just getting to grips with a different operating system, which I'll blog about later.