New to (owning) mac - my new powerbook ROCKS - but a couple questions

[stagmeister]

So the other day, my dad and I picked up my PB 15" from the apple store and I have been working with it pretty much since them (besides going to work and sleeping and stuff). MAN, this is one slick machine, it's amazing!!! I've worked with macs before (after my old computer died when I was at school, I used the macs in the CS lab pretty much exclusively) but this is the first time I've ever owned a mac and it is so cool.

I transferred most of my files from my ipod (where I had all of the files from my windows machine backed up), imported my gigantic e-mail inbox into Mail (which was a major pain but it's workking a little better now), and have started to play with Spotlight which is pretty cool stuff and get myself organized to actually start getting work done again.

However a couple of questions. Should Mail.app use like 50% of the processor? For some reason it seems like every once in a while it just doesn't display any messages in the listing or what. Maybe it's because i'm re-organizing my messages because it was really messed up on my old computer, or does mail.app have problems with large inboxes?

Also my mac froze last night when I was transferring files off of my ipod, and I had to reboot the pb which was pretty scary because I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. After the reboot, the mac wouldn't mount the ipod, though my windows machine could. So I transferred my files over the network by mapping the ipod as a network drive. However I'm trying to transfer my music now, and the ipod is saying things like that it can't read the files (even though when I listen to the ipod normally it still works like it should).

The one other thing I'm having trouble with is that I want to take my contacts out of Thunderbird and put them into the os's Address Book so that I can get to them via the address book widget and so on. I found a perl script to export the contacts as a vCard and hacked it accordingly so that it would work with the files where I had them, but the address book wouldn't bite and import them. Anyone have any experience with doing this?

Otherwise everything is fantastic! I love this machine and it definitely will serve me well. :-D

Thanks to everyone who answered my questions (whether you knew it or not) while I was doing the research to buy this fantastic comp.

Jason

 

[moliere]

I'll answer the part about transferring your music files from the iPod to the Mac.

And the answer is.... You can't just transfer the music files from your iPods to the Mac by dragging the files over on Finder or in iTunes.

I've tried. Not even if the music came from your Mac originally (like in my case). To do that, you have to use a (probably illegal) piece of software like Senuti (http://wbyoung.ambitiouslemon.com/senuti/). It takes some time to get the music back into your computer, but it does work.

Anyhow, congratulations on your new powerbook. I've got my new 15" for 4 weeks now, and I'm just loving it. In fact, just this morning, I actually said "I love you" to my lovely powerbook. That's when I realized I have to make an appointment with my therapist again.

 

[yellow]

However a couple of questions. Should Mail.app use like 50% of the processor? For some reason it seems like every once in a while it just doesn't display any messages in the listing or what. Maybe it's because i'm re-organizing my messages because it was really messed up on my old computer, or does mail.app have problems with large inboxes?

IMO, no.. it should not be using this much CPU. Please define "large" for your inbox. Is it 1GB? 2GB? 5GB? A couple hundred MB? 1GB is pushing it, anything larger and Mail.app starts to behave strangely.

 

[mklos]

What I would do to get your music from your PC to your Mac is if you have iTunes on your PC, then take the entire iTunes folder which is probably inside the My Music folder and drag it over to your Mac. This will transfer not only the songs, but also the information with the song (CD Cover, album, song, artist, etc). Try resetting your iPod and it should remount on the desktop. Like the other person said, you're not going to be able to drag the songs from your iPod into the Music folder inside OS X. They're hidden files on the iPod that you can't see with a special program.

If your addresses are in a vCard format then try dragging them in one at a time. You can try dragging the vCard file right into the address book. Maybe even launch Address Book and then drag the vCard into the white box in the center where it would show the address card itself.

Mail has gotten a lot better, but isn't made it handle corporate size emails. So the more mail you have in your inbox, the more RAM it will take. I would try organizing them in folders, and getting rid of the ones you don't absolutly need. You'll love the junk mail filter built into Mail. There's nothing like it on the PC side.

One thing I would do is condition the battery. This will make the battery last as much as twice as long on a single charge. To condition the battery, you run it all the way down to like 5% battery life, then shut down the PowerBook and let it charge to 100%, then run it down again to about 5%, then shutdown the PowerBook and let it recharge back up to 100%, then do the same thing one more time. The kind of batteries in PowerBooks, or any laptop for that matter kinda remember how its being used. So for example, if you never let it get below 40% battery life then most of the time you won't get much battery life past 40%. So if you run it almost all the way down and then charge it all the way back up a few times it will work more efficiently and you'll get more battery life of your battery.

 

[stagmeister]

What I would do to get your music from your PC to your Mac is if you have iTunes on your PC, then take the entire iTunes folder which is probably inside the My Music folder and drag it over to your Mac. This will transfer not only the songs, but also the information with the song (CD Cover, album, song, artist, etc). Try resetting your iPod and it should remount on the desktop. Like the other person said, you're not going to be able to drag the songs from your iPod into the Music folder inside OS X. They're hidden files on the iPod that you can't see with a special program.

I know about this... the problem is that it's a little more complicated than that. My old laptop's hard drive (an ancient compaq) died about two and a half months ago, with the only thing remaining being my ipod which luckily had a week-old backup of everything, except my music which was stored in the normal way on the ipod. So I could use something like ipodAgent to transfer the music to my desktop PC's hard drive, except for the fact that it won't fit on my PC's HD since it is a much smaller hard drive than the one my old laptop had, and with the other junk that is currently sitting on the desktop, there isn't enough room for it. I'm trying to do the same thing but on my brother's PC because he has a bigger HD, but ipodAgent keeps crashing on us. I'm not sure if it's because of the iPod (I certainly hope not!) but I tried mounting the iPod using Disk Utility, and it wouldn't do it but suggested that I do a disk repair and then try to re-mount. I did that, but the repair "failed" (not sure exactly what that means for the ipod), however it still mounts on my PC and I can still listen to the tunes normally. Weird. I think that apple choked on the drive when it was trying to index it for spotlight (which AFAIK it shouldn't do, because it's a removable drive- right??).

If your addresses are in a vCard format then try dragging them in one at a time. You can try dragging the vCard file right into the address book. Maybe even launch Address Book and then drag the vCard into the white box in the center where it would show the address card itself.

I think I have figured it out, I need to export them as LDIF or a txt file. Address Book will take txt-formatted addresses, right? Unfortunately Thunderbird is dumb and won't export the contacts as vcards directly, I tried a perl script to do it for me but it put them all in one file and Address Book wouldn't take them. I'll have to play with it more to see what works, I'll have a chance to do that later today.

Mail has gotten a lot better, but isn't made it handle corporate size emails. So the more mail you have in your inbox, the more RAM it will take. I would try organizing them in folders, and getting rid of the ones you don't absolutly need. You'll love the junk mail filter built into Mail. There's nothing like it on the PC side.

Yeah I know that more mail = more memory. It seems to have gotten better now though, that I've stopped moving massive amounts of e-mail around and re-organized my folders. I used to have it by year and then by type, I decided that I would just do it by type and sort by date and stuff, I was meaning to do it a while ago but never got around to it, so I did it now. The Junk filter seems cool, is it bayesian like the one in Thunderbird?

Thanks everyone!!!

 

[yellow]

The Junk filter seems cool, is it bayesian like the one in Thunderbird?

Yes it is..

 

[AliensAreFuzzy]

There's actually a little trick to getting music off of your iPod that I've figured out. For this you'll need a windows PC. Mount the iPod in disk mode. Then open the disk through explorer. Make sure you have hidden files set to be viewed. Open up the folder iPod_Control, then Music. All of your music is in those folders. Just copy it to your computer, and then reimport them into iTunes.